Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

Can you control your lights with Zabbix? Of course you can!

As I told during my Zabbix Summit 2023 speech, there will be a blog series about how I control my home with Zabbix. Let's start with how I control my home office lights -- or any light connected to our Cozify -- with it.

First of all, in Cozify I have the office light (Philips Hue) like this.

In December, my wife told my how she's annoyed about one Finnish company which tends to change its product prices out of nowhere all the time. To visualize this, of course I added a random product from that company's website to my dear What's up, home? monitoring.

The products in question are not complex to manufacture, and are not dependent on terribly fluctuating things like chip availability, oil prices or similar factors. Anyway, the price randomness is very real - the price varies between 23.90 EUR and 59.90 EUR.

This is the difference in I/O wait times after I replaced the faulty Raspberry Pi memory card to brand new one.

So, from about 8-9 seconds AVERAGES to back almost non-existent! Yay!

Now almost a year ago I blogged about my nine months of experience with running Zabbix on Raspberry Pi 4. I guess it's time to revisit that a bit, as the probably soon-to-fail memory card that came with Raspberry is causing all kinds of issues, even though everything important like Zabbix database is stored on external USB drive.

The filesystem layout

My Raspberry Pi is still booting from the memory card that came with it. However, I have moved much of the stuff to external USB drive I have connected to Raspberry:

Can you monitor your MacBook behaviour with Zabbix? Of course you can!

My personal Mac is old. It's way too old, actually. It's a MacBook Pro Retina mid-2012 -- yes, I bought it back in August 2012. It has served me well, even so well that with OpenCore Legacy Patcher it has been if not snappy, but fast enough to use for my blogging purposes and so forth. The laptop was running macOS Ventura until few days back, but then I made a mistake -- a big mistake -- as I upgraded it to latest macOS Sonoma.

AIEEEE!!! Potential hiccups ahead for my master server, as today I started to observe these in dmesg output after rebooted my Raspberry Pi.

Just.a quick note: as the Drupal version (9.x) this site was running on is not supported anymore, I migrated the site to Drupal 10.x. As the theme I was using with Drupal 9.x is not compatible with 10.x, the site is for now using the Drupal 10 default theme. That actually looks quite OK, so I'll get back to theming whenever I have time.

Can you monitor NixOS with Zabbix? Of course you can! And that's why I've been silent lately.

Well the bold text is pretty much unnecassary. NixOS is at least semi-supported for Zabbix. I would not set my primary server with NixOS, not with its current state, but for everything else, it's awesome and different.

Thanks everyone for the awesome Zabbix Summit 2023! It was a pleasure, yet again. Here's just a quick update, as unfortunately I was sick for several days last and this week.

Now... the QR code thing I did show to you during my first speech. The next day I told that total I saw about 800 hits to that page. Of course, we had a joker in our audience who wanted to refresh the page more than once, and he admitted that to me after the event on LinkedIn. :) 

Want to watch my Zabbix Summit 2023 speeches? They are now on YouTube.

• Controlling my home with Zabbix
• Monitoring myself with Zabbix