Metrics dashboards in Grafana or similar tools show you how your infrastructure is performing. Querying sensors gives you additional information (e.g., voltages, temperatures, and fan speeds) that you can use to analyze and protect against failures. In this article, I look at the tools you can use to query sensors.
Previous articles looked into the use of tools such as InfluxDB, Telegraf, or Collectd to help retrieve metrics from running systems and visualize the results in Grafana. Thus far, however, the articles have focused on the basic software architecture of a TICK stack [1] (i.e., Telegraf, InfluxDB, Chronograf, Kapacitor; alternatively, TIG [2] with Grafana instead of Chronograf, or CIG with Collectd instead of Telegraf) and how to use it to collect performance data from your environment. In other words, you…