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Linux Sensors (lm-sensors)

Plugin: python.d.plugin Module: sensors

Overview

Examine Linux Sensors metrics with Netdata for insights into hardware health and performance.

Enhance your system's reliability with real-time hardware health insights.

Reads system sensors information (temperature, voltage, electric current, power, etc.) via lm-sensors.

This collector is supported on all platforms.

This collector supports collecting metrics from multiple instances of this integration, including remote instances.

Default Behavior

Auto-Detection

The following type of sensors are auto-detected:

  • temperature - fan - voltage - current - power - energy - humidity

Limits

The default configuration for this integration does not impose any limits on data collection.

Performance Impact

The default configuration for this integration is not expected to impose a significant performance impact on the system.

Metrics

Metrics grouped by scope.

The scope defines the instance that the metric belongs to. An instance is uniquely identified by a set of labels.

Per chip

Metrics related to chips. Each chip provides a set of the following metrics, each having the chip name in the metric name as reported by sensors -u.

This scope has no labels.

Metrics:

MetricDimensionsUnit
sensors.temperaturea dimension per sensorCelsius
sensors.voltagea dimension per sensorVolts
sensors.currenta dimension per sensorAmpere
sensors.powera dimension per sensorWatt
sensors.fana dimension per sensorRotations/min
sensors.energya dimension per sensorJoule
sensors.humiditya dimension per sensorPercent

Alerts

There are no alerts configured by default for this integration.

Setup

Prerequisites

No action required.

Configuration

File

The configuration file name for this integration is python.d/sensors.conf.

You can edit the configuration file using the edit-config script from the Netdata config directory.

cd /etc/netdata 2>/dev/null || cd /opt/netdata/etc/netdata
sudo ./edit-config python.d/sensors.conf

Options

There are 2 sections:

  • Global variables
  • One or more JOBS that can define multiple different instances to monitor.

The following options can be defined globally: priority, penalty, autodetection_retry, update_every, but can also be defined per JOB to override the global values.

Additionally, the following collapsed table contains all the options that can be configured inside a JOB definition.

Every configuration JOB starts with a job_name value which will appear in the dashboard, unless a name parameter is specified.

Config options
NameDescriptionDefaultRequired
typesThe types of sensors to collect.temperature, fan, voltage, current, power, energy, humidityyes
update_everySets the default data collection frequency.1no
priorityControls the order of charts at the netdata dashboard.60000no
autodetection_retrySets the job re-check interval in seconds.0no
penaltyIndicates whether to apply penalty to update_every in case of failures.yesno

Examples

Default

Default configuration.

types:
- temperature
- fan
- voltage
- current
- power
- energy
- humidity

Troubleshooting

Debug Mode

To troubleshoot issues with the sensors collector, run the python.d.plugin with the debug option enabled. The output should give you clues as to why the collector isn't working.

  • Navigate to the plugins.d directory, usually at /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/. If that's not the case on your system, open netdata.conf and look for the plugins setting under [directories].

    cd /usr/libexec/netdata/plugins.d/
  • Switch to the netdata user.

    sudo -u netdata -s
  • Run the python.d.plugin to debug the collector:

    ./python.d.plugin sensors debug trace

lm-sensors doesn't work on your device

ACPI ring buffer errors are printed


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