Motherboard Monitor and SNMP Informant

Motherboard Monitor is a program that reports your system's cpu temperature, fan speed and voltage readings using the built-in sensors on the processor and motherboard. It is freeware and can be downloaded here.

SNMP Informant-MBM is a Windows SNMP extension agent that makes data collected by Motherboard Monitor accessible via SNMP. This makes it possible for network management tools like Nagios and Cacti get low-level information from a wide array of motherboards.

A similar functionality is available from Speedfan and its SNMP extension. However, Speedfan does not allow itself to be run as a Windows service making it inappropriate for unattended monitoring.

Monitoring CPU Temperature

One of my favorite computer diagnostics package is Everest from Lavalys, Inc. It gives you a load of information about your computer without taking off its cover. Well, you still couldn't tell the temperature of your CPU even if you popped open the hood -- and that's something that Everest can do, with a clean graphical interface to boot.


An overheating CPU can be caused by poor airflow, clogged fan, poor heatsink contact, or dirt build-up among other factors. It can also be caused by processor-intensive tasks or a misbehaving computer virus.

Whatever the underlying cause, a high CPU temperature is a good indicator of an impending computer malfunction. It would be nice of we can capture the CPU temperature periodically, graph it and issue alerts when a critical threshold is breached. Now that's a job for Nagios.


In the succeeding posts, we'll see how this was done.