# BMC present but unreadable

- Rule ID: `ipmi_monitoring_unavailable`
- Priority: P3
- Category: Hardware (BMC/IPMI)
- Page: https://glassmkr.com/docs/rules/ipmi_monitoring_unavailable

## What it means

The kernel exposes an IPMI device on this host, so it has a BMC, but the agent read nothing from it. Two different faults look identical from here; the BMC may be silent, or the agent's own privileged access path may be broken, so run the quick check before escalating to hardware. Fan failure, PSU redundancy loss, SEL critical, SEL full and the SEL-derived ECC counts are all inactive while this lasts, and the host will read healthy on every one of them regardless of its real hardware state. If the BMC itself is down then remote power control and console access are unavailable too, so plan on-site help if the machine also needs recovery.

## Remediation

Every rule ships a distro-aware remediation workflow: prerequisites, the
command to run, how to verify it worked, and how to roll it back. Those are
instructions for an operator. Glassmkr does not execute them for you.
The workflow for this rule is on its page: https://glassmkr.com/docs/rules/ipmi_monitoring_unavailable