I’ve been working with Dell PowerEdge Servers for some time deploying many to remote sites without an on-site IT presence. Whether it be a branch office or IT is just out-sourced, you don’t have the opportunity to walk by it every day and see if there is any red or orange LED’s on the front panel. Add in fully automated maintenance, a great configuration, along with users’ not reporting issues and it’s easy to forget about it.

The iDRAC has different types of licenses. I always pushed Enterprise with a dedicated NIC. I would say this is mandatory if the team managing it is primarily remote.

The iDRAC Service Module can be configured to replicate hardware warnings, alerts, errors to the Windows Event Log. I always created a separate log and didn’t have it replicate into the System log.

Now for monitoring, I didn’t need to setup SNMP to monitor the physical server, I could just monitor the Windows Event Logs as usual and notify on any error that was logged in the Lifecycle Controller Log. This does require a custom installation to be performed of the iDRAC Service Module.

For more information on the iDRAC Service Module, go to https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln310557/dell-emc-idrac-service-module?lang=en

Direct Link for the user guide: https://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/product-support/product/idrac-service-module-v3.4.1/overview

For more information on iDRAC 9, head over to https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln311300/idrac9-home?lang=en