Our BMCs are not great at keeping accurate time

A BMC is an extra embedded computer on your server motherboard. As separate computers running a separate operating system, BMCs keep time independently from your server's time, and this time is visible in places like the IPMI event log. Having tracked how much an IPMI's idea of time drifts across our modest fleet for a while, well, we're now resetting the IPMI time once a day. The BMC time drift we're seeing isn't terrible, but it's enough to add up significantly if left uncorrected for very long, especially on some of our servers. In an ideal world, we would have all of our BMCs synchronize their clocks via NTP. In this world, not all of our servers have BMCs with dedicated network ports, and on top of that not all vendors include NTP as a free feature on all of their BMCs. Charging licensing costs for some features is a good way to insure that we don't use them, unless the licensing cost is trivial. In theory our BMC clock drift probably doesn't matter very much. Our servers almost never put anything into their IPMI event logs and we almost never look at them.