Monitoring Freezer with Zabbix

[Tarsinion]

Hi all,

Zabbix is brilliant .. i was using cacti and nagios but zabbix is just much more intuivtiv and my whole network is now monitored within minutes.

We are producing icecream .. a lot of icecream (comes good on the hot days) and the worst thing is a brocken deep-freezer.

I really would like to monitor the temperatur of the freezers. Is there a way with thirdparty tools? Of course there is project-buget to buy hardware or software...

Don't wanna buy a APC the temp sensor, they might not work at minus 15 degree ;-)

Cheers

Richard

[Calimero]

http://zabbix.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9657

maybe ?

[artesvida]

This one's rated down to -55 C, and seems reasonably cheap:
http://avtech.com/Products/Environment_Monitors/TemPageR_3E.htm

You might need to get the external sensor, because I don't know how happy the device will be living inside a freezer 24X7.

[nelsonab]

If you are located in the US or Canada I can get some of Florin's units to you a little quicker. I have a few on hand which I have purchased from him to get them them to folks in the US a little quicker. Normal delivery time from Romania to the US takes about 2-3 weeks.

I have setup a few of these units and I can tell you from experience they are great little units and I've been very happy with them thus far.

Here is a link to a quick data sheet for the sensor used:
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm?qv_pk=2812 (http://http//www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm?qv_pk=2812)

[Tarsinion]

Thanks a million for your answers mates, didn't aspect much replys :D.
We might need wireless sensors as well, i will have a look at the avtech devices.
I guess no device comes with nativ Zabbix support, but snmp will do the job.

Does anybody have sensors already connected to zabbix? :rolleyes:

Cheers,

Richard

[nelsonab]

I've got three units (11 sensors total) working with Zabbix right now, and they've been a godsend! At one location they have helped to diagnose AC problems before anyone started to notice a problem. At another site we noticed the Colo operators turned up the AC cooling point by about 10-15 degrees Fahrenheit.

I don't know if there is work on a wireless unit, but depending on your operation you could setup a wireless bridge if you have enough sensors.

[Tarsinion]

Hi nelsonab,

what hardware are u using? All your sensors are cable connected i guess.

Cheers :-).

Richard

[nelsonab]

We're using the Zabbix Hardware agent linked to above. The unit is very small appx 5cm x 5cm x 2.5cm. All of the sensors are wired into the device. The unit speaks SNMP and the Zabbix protocol. Because the sensors are wired into the device it's possible to wire up your own temperature sensor with say a 5m cable.

The units are pretty darn cool!

[Tarsinion]

hmmm sorry but i still don't understand exactly your setup :).
http://www.maxim-ic.com/quick_view2.cfm?qv_pk=2812 is linking to a programmable thermometer. It is interessting, but where is the hardware zabbix agent u mentions? Did you programm / flash the rom yourself?

May i ask u to have a bit more patience with me and explained your steps to your success more detailed :rolleyes: ??
Like: 1.) bought that. 2.) put into freezer 3.) config zabbix 4.) be happy.

Cheers :-)

[nelsonab]

I'm sorry I thought you had checked the link in the forums earlier.

Here's some links for you. :-)

Here are some graphs generated with the Zabbix Agent

http://zabbix.com/forum/showpost.php?p=35275&postcount=21

More information about it:
http://zabbix.com/forum/showpost.php?p=35335&postcount=24

Link for purchase:
http://www.microelemente.ro/produse-si-servicii/

The link to the temperature sensor is the one used buy the agent. It is attached to two wires which are in turn connected into the Zabbix agent. The data sheet can tell you the details of the sensor itself and it's accuracy and so forth. If you need custom lengths for your sensors that's very straight forward to do.

Hopefully I've managed to be helpful and shed better light on the device for you this time. :-)

[Tarsinion]

cool, thats really sounds interessting.
I just ordered the controller and one temp sensor.
Still: how is the temp sensor powered? Maybe i'm a bit stupid, but i did not find any data sheets :-)

Edit: Got the Link: http://www.microelemente.ro/MikroPascal/HWZA_V3_5_Firmware.zip

Edit2: You can connect 3 different sensors and they are all over paraside powered.

[nelsonab]

Awesome! You will need to get your own AC to DC power supply. The device will require 12v DC. You can pick one up now as you will just wire it into the device, that way you will be ready when it arrives.

cool, thats really sounds interessting.
I just ordered the controller and one temp sensor.
Still: how is the temp sensor powered? Maybe i'm a bit stupid, but i did not find any data sheets :-)

Edit: Got the Link: http://www.microelemente.ro/MikroPascal/HWZA_V3_5_Firmware.zip

Edit2: You can connect 3 different sensors and they are all over paraside powered.

[georgew]

I was planning to roll out a system based on a SNMP temperature monitoring system I have used in the past. When I realized that the cost was going to exceed $100 per sensor, the idea of fully instrumenting a cooling unit suddenly sounded expensive.

To diagnose failures, freon leaks, efficiency, coil cleanlieness, etc., the typical AC technician uses pressure gages and thermometers. But the experienced AC engineer veteran can do most of the troubleshooting with just temperature data. If you look at a freon pressure gage, it has scales in both pressure and temperature. So really, you can estimate pressure with nothing more than temperature data.

But not so fast... you can't just walk up to a freezer and accurately diagnose the system with the temperature you just measure once. What you really want to measure is trends over time. And you can't measure one spot, you need to measure several, the more the better. I could easily see measuring 12 temperature points to chart trends for a single unit. With that data, and some understanding of the thermodynamics of a system, you can see things like freon leaks, coils getting dirty, fans loosing their speed, iced coils, low voltage, bad motor capacitors, the list goes on and on.

To do this right, you need cheap sensors, and a LOT of them.

Enter 1-wire. 1-wire temperature sensors are $4 each, and you can put a bunch of them on a single run of cat5 cable.

Ice cream production? What a great example of an application for critical monitoring of a chilling system. If your freezer fails at 3am on a saturday morning, you might loose $100,000 worth of inventory before anyone notices. Have a large plant? Monitoring the efficiency of your systems could save thousands of dollars in power every month.

Put a probe on every motor housing, every coil, every refrigerant line. Measure the temperature of every component, every refrigeration phase, every air duct, every ambient condition. Put it all in zabbix graphs, and set alarm thresholds. Gather a couple months of data, and start looking at trends. Go clean the coils, and see the effect.

Use owfs to turn the sensor data into files containing data on your zabbix system, then use zabbix to graph everything you gather.

[Tarsinion]

... well we kind of doing this now and it already did pay out - more icecream for me and less on the floor!

We do have nice plasma 50' Monitors on the wall with the graphes of all freezers and alarms + escalation in place in case something happends. The most funny thing is the faces of people when i'm telling them that the most exencive thing was actually the monitor :D.

[elemarmb]

I use a cheap USB thermometer :

http://www.dealextreme.com/p/usb-digital-thermometer-dongle-software-displays-temperature-7003

The driver used :

http://www.relavak.com/downloads/temper-1.0.tgz

http://relavak.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/temper-temperature-sensor-linux-driver/