Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

Can you monitor your typing speed and accuracy with Zabbix? Of course you can! 

Why?

For some time now, I have felt that the external keyboard I use at home makes me a clumsy typer. Whenever I type with my Linux laptop or Mac keyboard, I feel like I make less typos than with the otherwise comfortable external keyboard.  To make the testing more scientific, time to summon good old typespeed and hook it with Zabbix.

Yesterday Zabbix blog had a fascinating entry on how you can use Zabbix to monitor Zabbix Security Advisories. The blog post does go above and beyond to make sure that everything gets captures planned, and does so by using web scraping and AWS Lambdas, for example. Their solution for sure generates better results than what I'm going to show you, but what I'm offering here is a solution that's 100% produced within Zabbix instead of using any 3rd party code.

Those who follow me on LinkedIn might have noticed already that this morning I mentioned about the recently revamped zabbix-cli. The tool has been rewritten from ground up and now it's really cool thing to use! Here are some examples how I can use it for monitoring my home.

Now it looks cool

It has colours, tables, advanced auto-completion, all kinds of goodies! Below is a short snippet from --help option.

After all Qubes OS and monZphere blogging, let's get closer to original theme of my blog - home monitoring, or monitoring myself.

Zabbix 7.0 API got a nice little history.push method, allowing you to send data to Zabbix over its API. How I'm going to use it? Thanks for asking, I'm going to send the song names of the music I'm listening to. For the sake of simplicity, this entry shows how to send a single value.

As part of my monZphere custom Zabbix modules blogging spree, here comes the next one. This is where things are getting more exciting. What if you could do your Zabbix tasks just by chatting with a friendly chatbot? What if I told you that you can actually do that today?

Here's yet another module by monZphere: Kanban view of your incidents. 

Standard Zabbix Problems view

Before going on to how it looks like, here's the standard Problems view in Zabbix, in case you would not have used Zabbix.

With Zabbix 7.0 improved widget framework, the game clearly is on and the custom modules are popping out.

Yesterday I promised, or at least wrote, that I might not monitor my Qubes OS virtual machines. But, as a monitoring addict, I had to do that. As this is just boring usual Linux monitoring, let's at least use the automatic agent registration feature of Zabbix to do this.

Here's a weird, perhaps overly paranoid habit of mine: each year I arrive to Zabbix Summit -- or any similar conference -- with my Linux laptop reinstalled from scratch, running with the fortress that is Qubes OS. 

Thanks to that, no matter what would happen to my laptop either physically or through super skilled black hats, there's absolutely no risk that anything important or sensitive would be lost. It gives me the peace of mind and is a fun little period of time when I play around with something Completely Else.

As a continuation to my testing of initMAX custom Zabbix 7.0 widgets PRO versions, here's itemMAX widget.

Item value widget 

Zabbix has come with the item value widget for as long as anyone can remember. In fact, it's among the most important widgets you could think of.