Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

This will start my blog series which I spoke about at the Zabbix Summit 2025 -- how and why I monitor my surroundings with Zabbix. The reason is partly conceptual, partly real, to showcase how Zabbix can potentially help you to make figuring out what's going on near you much easier. Let's dive in!

Where to get the price data?

In Finland, we have this community-driven fuel station price tracking site, polttoaine.net. It has been around since forever, but for my kind of Zabbix use purposes, has several downsides: 

First of all, THANK YOU all the Zabbix employees and summit visitors. Zabbix Summit 2025 was fantastic as always!

I truly did monitor the Zabbix Summit main hall wifi connection quality with my laptop. Results should be taken with a grain of salt, as these were measured with my about ten years old Dell Latitude E7450 laptop with FreeBSD 14.3, so there's potential downgrade of everything thanks to that combo.

How did I monitor the quality?

My FreeBSD runs the following each minute via cron:

Zabbix Summit 2025 is almost here and this is just a quick note about what I am going to do.

Back in part 107 of this blog I went bananas and made a local LLava AI model to recognize what is in the image. But how reliably Llava('s smallest model) does actually recognize what is in the picture? Let's test it with Zabbix!

Methodology

For this test, I am 

I might sound like a monZphere fanboy, but that's because I am a monZphere fanboy. Another super cool module of their is their freshly published Zabbix Problem Analysis module, which is open-source and freely available for us all on Github.

The module adds a new Details button after an each alert on Problems view, giving you an easy way to get insights about that particular alert.

As I will be a speaker at the Zabbix Summit 2025, I've been busy building stuff for it; also had a summer holiday in July. Sorry for the long silence! Anyway, let's move on to today's topic.

MonZphere is cooking something really cool. 

Another year, yet another speech from me at the Zabbix Summit 2025! :) Be there! This time I'll be doing a short Lightning Talk about how I monitor my nearby surroundings and events with Zabbix.

When leaving your home, the traditional background chatterbox in your head can be thinking things like "Did I lock the front door?", "Did I turn off the oven?" and so forth. 

With an IoT hub like Cozify, there's another one. For example, if my parents -- who are not very technological -- will come to our house to entertain and look after the puppy whilst we are somewhere away with my wife and our toddler, without Zabbix my head would think "Did I remember to switch Cozify to such mode that it won't change the Home scene status to Away scene?". 

I stumbled upon something called Nanobrowser. It's a Chrome extension which turns your browser into open source AI web agent. 

What's an AI web agent? It makes your web browsing more exciting, with all the gotchas of LLMs combined with the speed and reliability that resembles a drunk grandpa attempting to use a computer without his glasses. No, jokes aside, it is kind of impressive. You just tell it what you want and it attempts to use your browser instead of you. Check this out:

I admit, this entry is very far-fetched (or near-fetched, depending on your camera position), but I'm sure you can come up with actual use cases for this. One scenario I can think of is that if you have a CCTV in your factory or whatever and something should stay within X meters from the camera, you can do it with this trick.