grafana

Lately I've been writing so much about GPT4All, synthetic monitoring and ProxySQL that this blog has drifted away from its original scope quite a bit. Let's return to roots for a while -- at least for this post, and see what's new on my home monitoring front. Or, not necessarily new, but details I have not shared with you earlier.

If you have a busy Zabbix system with lots of people using the web interface, perhaps Grafana with complex dashboards connecting to your Zabbix, and many other tasks directly communicating with the database, here's an idea: try out ProxySQL, a yet another nice open source product.

After my few posts about synthetic monitoring over multiple Proton VPN tunnels, it's now time to show some weird widget ideas. I did already show you the standard widgets and panels I made, but how about something that's possible through open source and the fantastic community? The custom widgets really make the observability machine to hum smoothly. This time, I'm showing some Grafana panels to visualize the data gathered by Zabbix.

As a continuation to my previous global blog HTTP response time monitoring, let's continue with tracerouting. Apart from extremely small modification, for this feature, I cannot take the credit, but it belongs to this guy. It's time to add some fancy mtr data to Zabbix!

My blog has global audience, so would be nice to know how well the site itself is reachable from different points of this planet. In this blog post, I'll setup a very different solution with Zabbix to do that. No remote proxies or agents, just a single home router and a VPN service. 

Also, in this story, I probably found out a small bug from Zabbix web scenarios, or how Zabbix or its agents behaves with them. I will let the Zabbix team to decide.

Here's something different to leave my Generative AI thing and overall Zabbix theme for a moment. 

Now that my (admittedly repetitive) Generative AI blog has been up and running for a while, it's time to give you ideas how to utilize this AI weirdness inside your Zabbix or Grafana, too.

How about an automatically updated alert summary for the next on-call person around the time the shift is about to change? There would be multiple ways of doing that, in my case I did it like this.

Create a cronjob

My cronjob runs the following every hour: 

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. :) 

I'm entering a whole new level of monitoring and "What's up, home?" could now also be called "What's up, me?". Recently my colleague did hint me about Home Assistant's HomeKit Controller integration just to get my HomeKit-compatible Netatmo environmental monitoring device to get to return value back to Zabbix without my Siri kludge.  One thing lead to another and now I'm monitoring my iPhone and Apple Watch -- so, practically monitoring myself.

Can you integrate a CO2 meter which really wouldn't want you to integrate it with Zabbix, with Zabbix? Of course you can! By day, I'm a Lead Site Reliability Engineer in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and do some weird experiments with them.

I have an el cheapo environmental monitor by Netatmo, showing the temperature, humidity, CO2 level and noise level.