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.
Hello, Apple Watch
I have Apple Watch Series 9, which comes with wrist temperature monitoring. It's both good and bad. The thermometer likely is good enough, but when (only while you sleep) and how it works, and more importantly, how the data is displayed, it's something that drives a monitoring nerd crazy.
Look at that graph. What's missing? The actual values! Is my baseline temperature +5C and I'm dead? Or +70C and nearly boiling? +32C, enjoying hypothermia? Or regular +36.5C? I wouldn't know by looking at that graph.
The screenshot is from my Apple Watch, but the same thing happens on iPhone Health app too, it doesn't want to tell you your baseline temperature or show the values. I can get to individual values by going to Health app, choosing Wrist Temperature, tapping All Data and then check the results day by day, but that's not fun.
And, as it's me, of course I want to start monitoring my wrist temperature with Zabbix. Let's start!
Let's go to iOS shortcuts
Yes, this will be yet another blog post where I use iOS Shortcuts. This time I'll be using the Automations feature of it. Every morning 8am my phone will gossip the results to my Zabbix using Zabbix 7.0+ history.push API call.
Please note that if you update to Zabbix 7.2, the deprecated way of authenticating (pass auth parameter with request body) is not there anymore, you need to start using Authorization header with Bearer yourapitoken way instead.
Adding this to Zabbix
On Zabbix side this is super easy. I only added a new host janne, and one item, Wrist temperature to it.
For preprocessing I had to add a small regular expression. Why? Apple Health or Shortcuts can send that temperature value as REALLY accurate (or just trolling monitoring addicts like me), as the result could be something like 35.824213412351235123444213412342314, anyway a number with enough decimals that Zabbix refused to receive it. So, my shortcut only takes four decimals. Should be accurate enough for an old feller like me who measures his fever with traditional mercury temperature meter.
And that's it! Now I can see my temperature in a nice Zabbix graph.
And should I ever have fever again, Zabbix will now alert me about that. The wrist temperatures seem to be lower than when taken with traditional fever meters, so let's see how well these alerts will work...
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