IPMI, while not yet as widespread as SNMP, can provide software-independent hardware monitoring for some devices, usually servers. It is becoming more and more popular as the out-of-band monitoring and management solution that should help us watch over hardware states for compliant devices.
Zabbix supports monitoring normal sensors such as voltage, RPM, or temperature, as well as discrete sensors that can pack a lot of information in to a single integer. To decrypt the information hidden in that integer, Zabbix offers a special trigger function called band(), which enables us to do bitwise masking and matching specific bits.
IPMI, covered in this chapter, is at a fairly low level in the system stack. In the next chapter, we will go notably higher: we will discuss ways to monitor Java applications using the JMX protocol. Zabbix supports JMX via a dedicated process called the Zabbix Java gateway, which we will set up.