Part 3: Zabbix the weatherman

Forecasts gone wrong

In this weekly Friday blog series I am showing you how I am monitoring my home with Zabbix and Grafana. The whole project is my fun recently started hobby and is already beyond what I originally was aiming for.

New to series? Then please first read part 1 and part 2.

* * *

This week I did advance my project on multiple fronts, so welcome to this little smorgasbord of different topics. In my future posts I will go deeper into each topic as my project goes forward.

Zabbix the weatherman

Let me begin with a monitoring blooper.

As Zabbix has very well working forecast/prediction functions for your usual IT capacity trending, I tried what happens if I let it predict the outdoor temperature based on recent temperatures. At my first try this did not go as I planned.

Zabbix prediction thought it would be as cold as -100 Celcius out there in a week. Hopefully not true.

You see, currently here in Finland the temperatures change a lot during a 24 hours period: from nightly -10C or below temperatures to maybe +5C to +10C during the day. As I asked Zabbix to predict the weather based only on one hour of data one day ago, this did not go as planned.

OK, clearly the one hour worth of data was too little. What if ask Zabbix to base its forecast on one week worth of data?

With one week sample Zabbix shows that it will "only"​ be -21C in one week.

The prediction slightly improves -- at least it won't predict a nuclear winter anymore -- but only slightly. Zabbix in its little mind has no idea that the weather could get warmer due the springtime. Or, in case Zabbix was right, I'll let you know in a week.

Average data for Joe Average

As my monitoring setup collects more data, one thing I can get out of it will be averages. What's the average temperature? What's average for this and that?

One day average values

Above shows the average data for the last 24 hours, and on my Grafana dashboard the values change dynamically based on the time period I choose on it.

Who wouldn't need home SLA reports?

Everybody knows how The Suits love their reports. I have this mental image where I think during their mornings they are like

[x] coffee

[x] warm bread

[x] orange juice

[x] classical music

[x] latest reports

And oh dear, their morning is ruined if the [x] is missing from the last entry. Poor Suits.

Anyway, as the recent Zabbix 6.0 brought us revamped Business Services Monitoring, why not to use them for home monitoring, too? This part is very much work in progress, but I will show you the current progress.

List of services I have configured for my home -- each room is a different service

When I'm finished, each room will be configured as its own Business Service. For now, I only have entered in the room names and some other stuff. The one room with some actual content for now is our bedroom. What happens if I click on it?

Clicking on bedroom shows the status for lights and temperature

I will get to see if the lights and temperature are OK, both from technical standpoint and for their values. In case the status would not be OK, the root cause column would show me the reason why everything is not OK -- though I would not need to click my way this far, the data would be shown on the previous page already.

As for SLAs (Service Level Agreement, for example, if you promise that your service will be available 99.9% of the time, it better be or your customer will be a sad panda and yell at you), those are work in progress, too. Zabbix can be let to generate daily/weekly whatever SLA reports for any of the configured Business Services. I have yet to build them, but I have one for my home router already.

SLA report for home router. Otherwise 100%, but on the week I bought the router (and did setup the SLA report) it is showing red

Come on, it's sunny, let's go out, Zabbix!

True story: this morning my wife asked that could I add pollen monitoring to Zabbix. My non-technical wife is getting excited about home monitoring, too! (I think she's only pretending. Still AWESOME!)

I still need to add pollen monitoring -- the data is available as open data -- but I initialised The Great Outdoors Monitoring in two other areas.

Where's my train?

Just before creating this post I proved myself that I can show live train data on Grafana. I sure got a screenful, as I have not played around with GraphQL too much, and for now I got way more trains than I planned to get, and the data contains extra fields I need to filter out with Grafana's Organise Fields. Still, connection established! Wooooo!

So many trains

What's for lunch?

Only added one lunch restaurant for now, but in theory I will receive an alert whenever the restaurant posts its new weekly lunch menu. Zabbix is configured to be a good netizen though and it will only try to fetch the menu every one hour on Monday morning, no point to poll them all week, so let's see how this will work.

Lunch menu trigger

That's all for now. See you next week!

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and am a walking monitoring unit.

 

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