Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

In my previous post I did show some command-line tools that could be useful for showing interesting metrics about your Mac. I also told that in the follow-up post I would show you how to monitor your Apple Silicon (with that, I mean Apple M-series chips CPU/GPU/ANE [Apple Neural Engine]) with Zabbix.

I'm almost successful with that, but then still embarrassingly far. This has not been my most successful project so far. I am sure there would be so many better ways -- if so, please let me know! 

When using command line, I of course have my trusted tool belt with plenty of legendary shell commands that have been around for decades. But just to keep myself fresh and not become a grumpy Unix greybeard, every now and then I explore what's out there today. Here are some tips that may or may not help you with Zabbix as well.

I've been a bit silent since the Maikki the puppy takes a lot of time. Anyway, here's something different to give you new ideas. 

About every company out there is rolling out their new innovative AI solutions (aka "here, have a yet another OpenAI wrapper"), and so am I -- though through local LLMs and shell one-liners to make these ground-breaking innovations tad a bit easier for you to use and brainstorm with new ideas. By using these, you'll be also using reasoning AI running on your local machine, for free. Good boy, you!

Beginning tomorrow, our family life changes as we're going to get a puppy! This might mean I might be a bit more silent here (or then not, we'll see), but also that means that in one way or another, I'm gonna monitor the dog. :)

We're going to have a puppy in about one week. Cannot wait! 

BUT ... our home router was in a bit of a danger zone considering the puppy, so I moved the home router from our living room to my home office. 

First things first

As our home is very much monitored by Zabbix, of course I needed to first setup a maintenance window before starting the move.

Long time ago back in part 21 I blogged on concept level about how to monitor your CCTV streams with Zabbix and some shell scripting. The idea back then was to use mplayer, vlc or similar tool for watching the stream. If the playback stops, then the stream is broken, thus there's something wrong with the camera or the connectivity to it. That method works, but with Zabbix 7.0 and its Selenium tests, it's very much possible to monitor your CCTV natively through Zabbix without any external scripts.

Those of you who have read my blog for long enough might remember how I showed how to monitor the color of a banana. This, of course, motivated by Steve Destivelle the Banana Guy. My example back then was a quick hack to just show the potential and compared to what's possible today with the inevitable march of LLMs, it was very primitive.

I know, outside of the scope of this blog, but worth mentioning here for the future generations to marvel. 

Thank you, Forcepoint and my dear colleagues! I'm just doing my work and being the punny myself.

Last week I got to experience the fun little thing that is pneumonia. It was annoying but luckily not TOO bad. Nevertheless, nearly +39C for some time plus some side effects of that made me sleep a lot. Or, if not sleeping, at least staying in my bed.

What does a monitoring nerd do while trying to heal? Thinks how to monitor his fever, of course. 

Some time ago Metricio interviewed me for their blog, and here is the transcript of the interview on their blog. :)