Expose dmi info (as label?)

[klausenbusk]

Hello

We have roughly ~ 100 Linux boxes on different hardware (mostly different versions of Gigabyte Brix and Intel Nuc and a few other hardware combinations)

It could be useful if the dmi info was exposed as label. Kind of like node_uname_info
Maybe node_dmi_info{manufacturer="MICRO-STAR INTERANTIONAL CO.,LTD", product="MS-7368"}

For example this is what dmidecode --type system expose (found somewhere on google, I'm not at my Linux computer right now):

server1:/home/admin# dmidecode --type system
# dmidecode 2.8
SMBIOS 2.5 present.

Handle 0x0001, DMI type 1, 27 bytes
System Information
        Manufacturer: MICRO-STAR INTERANTIONAL CO.,LTD
        Product Name: MS-7368
        Version: 1.0
        Serial Number: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
        UUID: Not Present
        Wake-up Type: Power Switch
        SKU Number: To Be Filled By O.E.M.
        Family: To Be Filled By O.E.M.

Handle 0x0027, DMI type 12, 5 bytes
System Configuration Options
        Option 1: To Be Filled By O.E.M.

[SuperQ]

We're still unsure about exposing "inventory" metrics from the node_exporter. Some people are strongly against it, I personally think some of it is ok.

There are a couple issues with this specific request:

• This would require we exec dmidecode.
• This would require root privs.

These are things we don't want to do in the exporter.

I would recommend using a script that parses the output of dmidecode and produces the metric for use with the textfile collector. I could probably whip something up for this.

[bdrung]

We like to expose the BIOS version as metric (to allow alerting about outdated versions). Since this information can be retrieved from /sys/class/dmi/id without root permission (unless you want to read the serial numbers), I created prometheus/procfs#409 as first step.

[SuperQ]

Nice, I had no idea dmi had a sys interface.