Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

Only few more weeks until Zabbix Summit 2026! I'll be a speaker yet again, this time with a five minutes Lightning Talk quickly showing you some VERY different custom Zabbix widgets. Goodbye boring graphs and text tables, welcome Something Completely Else.

I have been very silent on this site due work, family life and the fact I've been building all the custom stuff about which there then will be blog posts. They are already lurking behind the scenes, just waiting for to be posted.

Do you know how often your system is attacked, or what the attackers would do if they could actually ssh into your systems?

Those who work in IT industry, know the drill. The Suits love (or hate) SLA percentages. It's in their genes to be aware of how many seconds or minutes or hours your super important service have been up or down today, this week, this month, or any other time interval. I get all the reasons for that, and I love those statistics too -- at least as long as they show favorable numbers. 

I updated my home Zabbix to Zabbix 8.0.0beta1 a while ago, and now that I've been using it, here's some of the new features I like. In this post, I'll take a glance at some user interface updates that might not be massive but improve the overall experience a lot. In beta1, from new JSON item type to plethora of new templates to performance improvements, many of the bigger new things seem to be under the hood, but I'll skip them for now.

Come on buddies, come to spotlight. Problems view, you first.

I recently switched our car to a used Toyota bz4x. For those who don't know, it's much like Toyota RAV4 but a fully electric version of it. Unlike our old RAV4, bz4x is constantly online. It only means one thing: I'm going to monitor it with my dear Zabbix.

Creating the integration

I cannot take much credit for this integration, as to be honest, much of this integration was actually created by Claude. I did tell it about my Zabbix, the car I have, and pretty soon I had a working integration cobbled together.

Basically Claude created few files for me:

Did you know you can use your MacBook Pro trackpad as a scale? Now you know. Did you know that you can also monitor the recordings with Zabbix? Of course you can! 

I stumbled upon TrackPad Weight Scale and I couldn't help myself, I just had to try it out.

Installing TrackPad Weight Scale

Installation was almost as smooth as the GitHub page promises; throw in few commands and you are done. Well, in my case I had to change Sources/TrackPadWeight/TrackPadMonitor.swift line 134 from 

Hint to this blog post came from my Forcepoint colleague -- today I visited our Helsinki office after a long break and looks like that at least one of my colleagues follows my blog. With Raspberry Pi and any device using SD cards, there's this real fear of sudden hardware failure of the said SD card. Writing lots and lots of data to them will eventually make them go bad. But can you predict that with Zabbix? Of course you can!

Currently with my home ISP, no ports are open from the outside world to my home, and that's a pretty tight rule. 

Luckily, Tailscale allows me easy access to my selected devices from anywhere I may roam. Using Tailscale requires an account, but at home and smaller scale is free to use. There would also be self-hosted Headscale, but for now I'm using Tailscale as it was so easy and fast to take into use.

Bad Apple animation is like Doom, it runs on everything and everywhere. It's been ported to C64, Amiga, Atari ST. It's been running inside Minecraft in few different ways. It's been ported to physical world. 

Let's vibe code

The other day I installed OpenAI's Codex to my personal MacBook. Little did I know what would happen if I would prompt it to create a custom Zabbix 7.0 widget which brings Bad Apple meme to life on Zabbix. 

I had an Asuswrt-Merlin based home router for many years. However, my trusty ASUS RT-AX68U started to misbehave badly -- most of the CPU time spent on I/O wait for no clear reason, dropping especially 2.4 GHz connections and more. 

I then stumbled upon a very affordable ASUS RT-AX59U.Not the latest and greatest, but it had something I wanted: good support for OpenWrt. It was time for me to try out something else than Asuswrt-Merlin just to be different.