Earlier this year, Maikki the poodle joined our family, and it's about time that we start monitoring her. This time the idea came from my wife, as she spotted Invoxia Minitailz smart AI collar for dogs during some dog training session she attended to. Yesterday Maikki entered the sweet, sweet world of monitoring.
Smart collar? Woof?
It's like Apple Watch but for dogs, but instead of attaching it to wrist it's a keyfob stylish thing that snaps to dogs usual collar. It gathers all kinds of health metrics from your furry friend and measures her activities.
Getting this thing up and running on a mobile phone is easy. Download the app, create an account, pair the device over Bluetooth like you would pair a headset, done. After a few moments, stuff like this starts to appear.
So, you get a view about your dogs day and over time, her health.. In addition, the "AI" part looks like that ChatGPT or one of its kind generates a funny daily report based on the metrics and then shows it on the app.
You know where this is going
Can we monitor this thing with Zabbix? Of course we can! Or .. not yet completely, but since there seems to be some GitHub projects based on Invoxia's other GPS trackers, I spied from this unofficial Invoxia Web Client where the queries go and how. There's also a some Python available, but I didn't actually need any of this.
Without asking from Invoxia, I'm not going to go too deep here, as I couldn't find any official public API from them, but since those two projects have been around for a long time already,. I'll leave you to find out how to actually use the API by checking those projects out by yourself.
Let's just say that on Zabbix side of the house, one HTTP Agent item is enough to gather the data as JSON, and then it's just the usual low-level discovery or manually cherry-picking the values you care about, and this happens. BTW, in that dashboard screenshot, there's monZphere's excellent ECharts widget for Zabbix.
404 dog not found
Where's the dog info in that output? You got me -- that's the part my attempt is currently missing. Clearly that needs some other API call to be successful. Currently I'm able to track the tracker itself and alert if it goes offline, or battery too low,, for example. This work has just started and as such a very ruff draft at the moment. I hope I'll be able to pull this off. :)
