ISC2 Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP) Practice Question

Your organization runs a private IaaS cloud on several blade servers. The operations team must detect a failing chassis fan even if the hypervisor becomes unresponsive, so they can migrate workloads before overheating forces an outage. They need to pull raw sensor data such as fan revolutions per minute and board temperatures through an out-of-band channel that does not rely on any operating system or hypervisor agents. Which monitoring method best meets this requirement?

Install an agent in every guest OS to read thermal data from /proc or Windows Management Instrumentation
Collect Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) statistics from each guest virtual machine
Query the hypervisor for CPU utilization counters through the virtualization management platform
Poll the baseboard management controller using the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)

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Answer Description

The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) exposes environmental sensors-temperature, fan speed, voltage, and power-directly from the server's baseboard management controller. Because the BMC operates independently of the host CPU, memory, and operating system, IPMI continues to respond even when the hypervisor or guest OS has crashed, providing true out-of-band monitoring and allowing early detection of cooling failures. Querying a hypervisor management plane, polling SNMP data from guest VMs, or running in-guest agents all require the primary system software stack to be operational; if the hypervisor hangs or the OS is down, those methods cease to provide data, defeating the goal of proactive hardware health monitoring.

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