Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

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.

Would you like to be able to tell your manager much faster how often some alert happens and how rapidly that particular alert usually gets resolved? How about how often the alert has happened during the past 30 days compared to previous 30 days? I have great news for you!

This year marks the 40th year of my life with computers. 🎂 Like for so many others, my journey began back in 1986 with Commodore 64. What a journey it has been!

We have a separate garage building maybe 10-20 meters away from our main building. In our garage, we have a small yet cozy little room for guests or for second home office purposes.

This post is very much related to my previous post -- how our kid now excitedly turns our lights on and off from wall switch. Before the phase we are now living through, our lights were managed either automatically or through Cozify app, so we could put whatever scene would be suitable on, to turn on multiple lights with the brightness level and color we want.

Let's get back to the roots of this blog for a moment -- to monitor what's happening in our home.

To fully understand what's happening in this blog post, I'll explain the morning routine of our 3+ year girl. 

Over the past few weeks, when she wakes up some time after 06:00 before us, she comes out from her room and turns on our living room ceiling light from the wall switch. That light of course is an IoT light bulb, a Philips Hue, so I get to graph that nicely with Zabbix.

This blog post again belongs to topic I spoke about back in Zabbix Summit 2025 -- how do I monitor my nearby environment with Zabbix and how it can help planning my day.

You probably know how annoying it would be to go to train station, only to find out that your train has been cancelled, badly delayed or that you just missed the train for some reason. Zabbix to the rescue!

Let's monitor if

• my train is on time
• if it is not, how badly it is delayed
• or worse, if the train is cancelled

And more.  But how do we even start?

First of all, huge congratulations for my wife -- she started her own little business this month! That takes some real guts! Her business, SensoSoppi, is not about IT at all but about one's wellbeing. 

But, moving on to our topic. After this blog post I will be able to say that I am also monitoring my wife, or at least her business. Of course, her website is already being monitored by my Zabbix.