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 to 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.
But how to get to this level? Let’s rewind a bit.
Home Assistant
Home Assistant is a nice home automation software. It is open source and provides many, many integrations for automating your home. I now have my Netatmo comfortably monitored through that…
Bye-bye, mobile app and my Siri kludge. This screenshot is from Home Assistant.
… but while exploring Home Assistant’s integrations, I came upon its iCloud integration. Oh boy. This takes my monitoring to a whole new level.
But how to get this data to Zabbix?
On Home Assistant, you can go to your account settings and create a Long-lived access token. With that, you then just pass the authorization bearer as part of your HTTP request and you are done. So, like this.
This way you’ll receive your Home Assistant data back in JSON format. As the output is really really really long, and I needed just a relatively small set of data for myself, I cherry-picked those using the above item as the master item and then created a bunch of dependent items.
… and here’s a single item so you get the idea.
Let’s create some dashboards
Now that I have my data in Zabbix, it’s time to create some dashboards. Fascinating that I can now truly monitor my iPhone and Apple Watch like this.
I also created a Grafana dashboard.
Observations
This has been now running for roughly a day for me. Already some observations:
While driving, at traffic lights I tried to see what would happen if I disable the Bluetooth connection between my car and my iDevices. My status was reported as Cycling instead of Automotive for the rest of the trip. Hmm.
Not all the data will be updated in real-time, but there’s a significant lag. Also, it seems I might need to VPN to my home so the data would be updated sooner while I’m not at home.
iPhone’s custom focus modes are not updated to Home Assistant. During the sleep focus mode, the focus mode was reported as On, but for any other mode I tried it only shows Off. Shame, I would have loved to start tracking things like how long it takes for me to put our baby to sleep or how much of the time I’m spending with this blog. That has to wait for now.
But anyway, this thing just opened a whole new Pandora’s box for me to explore.
This post was originally published on the author’s page.
At GitHub, our favorite people are developers. We love to make them happy and productive, and today, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we want to celebrate their achievements by sharing some great stories about a few developers with disabilities alongside news of recent accessibility improvements at GitHub that help them do the best work of their lives.
Amplifying the voices of disabled developers
People with disabilities frequently encounter biases that prevent their full and equal participation in all areas of life, including education and employment. That’s why GitHub and The ReadME Project are thrilled to provide a platform for disabled developers to showcase their contributions and counteract bias.
Paul Chiou, a developer who’s paralyzed from the neck down, is breaking new ground in the field of accessibility automation, while pursuing his Ph.D. Paul uses a computer with custom hardware and software he designed and built, and this lived experience gives him a unique insight into the needs of other people with disabilities. The barriers he encounters push him to innovate, both in his daily life and in his academic endeavors. Learn more about Paul and his creative solutions in this featured article and video profile.
Becky Tyler found her way to coding via gaming, but she games completely with her eyes, just like everything else she does on a computer, from painting to livestreaming to writing code. Her desire to play Minecraft led her down the path of open source software and collaboration, and now she’s studying computer science at the University of Dundee. Learn more about Becky in this featured article and video profile.
Dr. Annalu Waller leads the Augmentative and Alternative Communication Research Group at the University of Dundee. She’s also Becky’s professor. Becky calls her a “taskmaster,” but the profile of Annalu’s life shows how her lived experience informed her high expectations for her students—especially those with disabilities—and gave her a unique ability to absorb innovations and use them to benefit people with disabilities.
Anton Mirhorodchenko has difficulty speaking and typing with his hands, and speaks English as a second language. Anton has explored ways to use ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot to not only help him communicate and express his ideas, but also develop software from initial architecture all the way to code creation. Through creative collaboration with his AI teammates, Anton has become a force to be reckoned with, and he recently shared his insights in this guide on how to harness the power of generative AI for software development.
npm is the default package manager for JavaScript and the largest software registry in the world. To empower every developer to contribute to and benefit from this amazing resource, the npm team recently completed an accessibility bug bash and removed hundreds of potential barriers. Way to go, npm team!
The GitHub.com team has also been hard at work on accessibility and they recently shipped several improvements:
Great accessibility starts with design, requiring an in-depth understanding of the needs of users with disabilities and their assistive technologies. The GitHub Design organization has been leaning into accessibility for years, and this blog post explores how it has built a culture of accessibility and shifted accessibility left in the GitHub development process.
When I think about the future of technology, I think about GitHub Copilot—an AI pair programmer that boosts developers’ productivity and breaks down barriers to software development. The GitHub Copilot team recently shipped accessibility improvements for keyboard-only and screen reader users.
GitHub Next, the team behind GitHub Copilot, also recently introduced GitHub Copilot Voice, an experiment currently in technical preview. GitHub Copilot Voice empowers developers to code completely hands-free using only their voice. That’s a huge win for developers who have difficulty typing with their hands. Sign up for the technical preview if you can benefit from this innovation.
Giving back to our community
As we work to empower all developers to build on GitHub, we regularly contribute back to the broader accessibility community that has been so generous to us. For example, all accessibility improvements in Primer are available for direct use by the community.
Our accessibility team includes multiple Hubbers with disabilities—including myself. GitHub continually improves the accessibility and inclusivity of the processes we use to communicate and collaborate. One recent example is the process we use for retrospectives. At the end of our most recent retrospective, I observed that, as a person with blindness, it was the most accessible and inclusive retrospective I have ever attended. That observation prompted the team to share the process we use for inclusive retrospectives so other teams can benefit from our learnings.
More broadly, Hubbers regularly give back to the causes we care about. During a recent social giving event, I invited Hubbers to support the Seeing Eye because that organization has made such a profound impact in my life as a person with blindness. Our goal was to raise $5,000 so we could name and support a Seeing Eye puppy that will eventually provide independence and self-confidence to a person with blindness. I was overwhelmed by the generosity of my coworkers when they donated more than $15,000! So, we now get to name three puppies and I’m delighted to introduce you to the first one. Meet Octo!
Photo courtesy of The Seeing Eye
Looking ahead
GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke, frequently says, “GitHub thrives on developer happiness.” I would add that the GitHub accessibility program thrives on the happiness of developers with disabilities. Our success is measured by their contributions. Our job is to remove barriers from their path and celebrate their accomplishments. We’re delighted with our progress thus far, but we are just getting warmed up. Stay tuned for more great things to come! In the meantime, learn more about the GitHub accessibility program at accessibility.github.com.
Can you create a proper weather dashboard with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am 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.
Since Zabbix 6.0 has provided you an official OpenWeatherMap template. It gives you all the standard weather details: temperature, humidity, and so on, for any location you’d like to observe.
However, by default, Zabbix does not come with a weather map template. Can we add one? Probably. I say probably because it looks like the free OpenWeatherMap account I created might not have enough credentials to show the layers. Still, let’s give this a try!
(And before you ask why I did not just add another custom geomap provider under Zabbix Administration –> General –> Geographical maps — I wanted to have these layer toggles for clouds etc, and that requires custom JavaScript)
Getting OpenWeatherMap account
Just go to the OpenWeatherMap site and create an account for yourself. Soon enough, you’ll get an API key you are supposed to use.
Embedding OpenWeatherMap to Zabbix UI
I found leaflet-openweathermap and even though it’s abandoned, the demo that comes with it seems to work just fine. Embedding that to Zabbix was not that of a big deal.
Clone the git project for yourself
Copy the example somewhere where you can serve it, I did put it on my Zabbix server under /assets/openweathermap/ directory
Load that map in an empty tab to verify you see it works for you
With the default App ID that is bundled with the map the layers do work, but it would not be cool to use the author’s API key as stated in the code
Change the AppID to one you have received … well, at this point it stopped working for me, but if you really need it, OpenWeatherMap is not that expensive
Then you can add it to Zabbix just by inserting a new URL widget and pointing that to your location.
How does it look like?
Here we go! And, as another idea for you, with the URL widget, you can embed any camera input to your dashboard, too, some hints in part 21 of this blog I don’t want to show you our own camera footage, so I added Lauttasaari, Helsinki location — that is where Forcepoint has its office.
Now that’s a weather dashboard for you.
Get alerted
OpenWeatherMap would also support alerts about severe weather conditions, but another option would be to find out your local weather data from your nearest provider and use their open data for this; in Finland for example, Finnish Meteorological Institute has its own open data for one to use. Then just add those to Zabbix via HTTP Agent item type for example much like I did in part 32 of this blog, and you’re done.
I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and as you know by now, I have this never-ending drive for monitoring. — Janne Pikkarainen
This post was originally published on the author’s page.
Can you monitor how much you drive your car, even if your car wouldn’t have any way to report back to Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am 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. Welcome to my blog about the project.
Some forewords: Now that our baby girl is over six months old, she has developed some kind of sleeping pattern. It means she goes to bed very early in the evening, around 6pm. Or, I go to the bedroom with her and wait for her to sleep steadily before I exit the bedroom without her noticing. It means I have lots of time to think, and also to play around with apps like iPhone Shortcuts. I have previously done a few Siri & Zabbix experiments and this will be one more.
I did do this shortcut only two days ago and have not actually driven yet, but I verified that the shortcut itself works when I go into my car and start it up. Also, as I don’t want to give out the exact location where we live, for this blog post I faked our car to be located in Santa Claus Village, Rovaniemi.
Let’s get started.
What are you planning?
Even though I already know very well how much I drive — there’s the odometer in our car, a fuel app in my iPhone shows how many liters per month I refuel, and so on, this data is still something that would contribute to my dear single pane of glass, like your company probably wants to have.
My Siri Shortcut is simple: whenever I go to my car and my iPhone connects to car Bluetooth, it’s a clear data point that I’m probably going somewhere, so the shortcut gets my current location and saves its coordinates to a text file in my iCloud.
Next, just like in my previous Siri examples, a Zabbix Agent on my MacBook keeps an eye on this text file, very much like in my FlightGear integration example, Zabbix will then populate the coordinates in Zabbix inventory for my car host. This way, I can project the car location to the Geomap widget.
Let’s create the shortcut
Here’s the shortcut in all its simplicity.
About that Append to Text File… why appending instead of overwriting, I’ll tell you a story some other day.
Why Desktop Directory? I’ll tell you a story some other day.
Next up, Zabbix
On the Zabbix side of the house, the story is like so many times in my posts: read the text file, and using dependent items create the longitude and latitude items.
Wait! You saved it on your Desktop but now it’s in /tmp? I’ll tell you a story about this kludge some other day… or immediately after this caption.
It was easier to get macOS Zabbix Agent to get to read /tmp instead of your home directory, as the security is in the way, so a cronjob syncs the file once per minute to /tmp. Not only that but because in iOS Shortcuts the Append to a text file was the only way I got the shortcut to run without it asking for permission to run, my cronjob is actually like this:
Beautiful? No, but due to reasons I had to do this, and at least it works.
Anyway, then the longitude/latitude-dependent items just use some regular expressions.
Beautiful? No, but it works.
Does it work?
Of course, it does! See for yourself.
Here’s the latest data…
… and here’s the Geomap.
But wait! How does this track your kilometers?
Heh, you got me. It does not. One easy way would be to use Get distance block in iOS Shortcuts. It actually works — you get to choose that yes I will be driving, give me the kilometers. Whenever I do that, I would need a text file containing just one line (which would contain the old location), and getting to that point without your iPhone asking anything ever is not so simple, so for now I gave up.
So, the next part of this will be to use some API and make my Zabbix calculate the distances. That would be cooler anyway, but I’ll find time for that next time. Anyway, from now on Zabbix will know the locations where I have started our car, so the data will be collected from today. I know there are limitations in this implementation, such as that if I start the car and just drive to some place and back without ever stopping the engine, that won’t really give me any results, but this is better than nothing.
I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and as you know by now, I have this never-ending drive for monitoring. — Janne Pikkarainen
This post was originally published on the author’s page.
Developers who feel more satisfied in their jobs are better positioned to be more productive. We also know developers can gain a sense of fulfillment by making an impact beyond the walls of their company and elevating their community. An opportunity exists, which developers can meet, to support those who lack access to the financial system. Many countries are working to drive financial inclusion through different motions—to which developers can contribute. GitHub provides a set of tools and services, which can support your developers working to address this need.
For example, in Australia, there is a huge opportunity to continue the work aimed at reaching those who are not currently included in the financial system. There are still a large number of people that don’t have access to important services that many of us take for granted—an opportunity that financial inclusion tries to solve.
Let’s explore these opportunities and how GitHub can help.
Financial inclusion explained
The World Bank defines financial inclusion as providing individuals and businesses access to affordable financial products to meet their needs. This includes products, such as checking accounts, credit cards, mortgages, and payments, which are still not available to over a billion unbanked people around the world. Many of these are women, people living in poverty, and those living outside of large cities.
Open Finance (or Open Banking) is an approach adopted by banks like NAB (National Australia Bank) to help include more individuals in the financial system by providing them access to the best products and services in a secure way that addresses their needs.
To enable financial inclusion and Open Finance, there needs to be a channel to exchange data and services between banks, customers, and trusted partners (fintechs, for example); that is where application programming interfaces (APIs) come in. The easiest way to understand an API is to think of it as a contract between two applications that need a standardized and secure way to talk to each other. Once the contract is created and secured, it can be used anywhere to share data or initiate a financial transaction.
This API-driven innovation lowers barriers for those individuals who may have limited physical access to banks, credit cards, or traditional financial products.
How GitHub can help
The tremendous opportunities for Australia, New Zealand, India, and other countries to enable financial inclusion to its population are dependent on the quality of the APIs. The quality and adoption of the APIs is dependent on creating a great developer experience because they are the ones building the APIs and applications that will leverage them.
GitHub is used by 100 million developers and is widely-recognized as the global home of open source. Developer experience is at the core of everything we do and it empowers developers to do their best work and be happy. But how does GitHub help enable financial inclusion and Open Finance?
The Open Bank Project released a report in 2020 highlighting how providing a great developer experience can drive growth of APIs that enable financial inclusion. Several topics which were highlighted and where GitHub can help are:
1. Create solutions to help people
This is an important motivator for developers. If developers create solutions that can help increase financial inclusion, they should make sure those solutions are available to as many people as possible through the open source community. Since we know that open source is the foundation of more than 90% of the world’s software, there is a great opportunity to collaborate globally and build on solutions that already exist.
Because GitHub is the home of open source and has 100 million developers, there is no better place for developers to create solutions that will make the biggest impact.
2. Running Hackathons
Hackathons, like the Global Open Finance Challenge, which NAB collaborated in and was won by an Aussie start-up, are important for developers to share ideas with other developers and large enterprises. They help developers see what APIs are currently available and enable innovation and collaboration with a global reach. To run a successful hackathon, developers will need to have access to code and documentation, which has been open sourced—and GitHub is a key component to enable this.
3. Recognition for developers
If a developer has worked on a solution that is helping enable financial inclusion, it’s important to ensure their effort is recognized and supported. The most important part of recognizing the awesome work developers do is to make sure there is a single platform where this work can be shared. Thankfully, that platform already exists and any developer, anywhere in the world, can access it for free—it’s GitHub!
At GitHub, we also know that sometimes recognition isn’t enough, and developers need support. This is why the GitHub Sponsors program was created. We also created our GitHub for Startups program which provides support to the startup community around the world—many of whom are important contributors to Open Banking.
4. Documentation
The success of an API is dependent on how easy it is for developers to understand and use. If developers are unable to quickly understand the context of the API, how to connect to it, or easily set it up to test it, then it probably won’t be successful.
The topic of API documentation and API Management is beyond the scope of this post, but it’s important to remember that open source is a key enabler of Open Finance and developers will need a platform to collaborate and share documentation and code. GitHub is the best platform for that, and we have seen at least a 50% increase in productivity when developers leverage documentation best practices enabled by GitHub.
Call to action
Developers have an amazing opportunity to contribute to the financial inclusion work that is happening in Australia and across the world. GitHub can help support developers to address this opportunity by giving them the tools and services they need to be productive and successful.
We’ve recently launched our weekly livestream on LinkedIn Live, GitHub in my Day Job, for those who want to learn more about how GitHub empowers developers across the community while providing guardrails to govern, and remain compliant. So, join us at https://gh.io/dayjob—we can’t wait to have you with us.
On 24 and 25 March, more than 140 members of the Code Club and CoderDojo communities joined us in Cambridge for our first-ever Clubs Conference.
At the Clubs Conference, volunteers and educators came together to celebrate their achievements and explore new ways to support young people to create with technology. The event included community display tables, interactive workshops, discussions,poster sessions, and talks.
For everyone who couldn’t join us in person, we recorded all of the talks that community members gave on the main stage. Here’s what you can learn from the speakers.
Running your club
Jane Waite from our team offered a taste of the research we do and how you can get insights from it to help you run your own coding club. Watch Jane’s talk to learn about the research that informs our projects for your club.
Rhodri Smith, who runs a Code Club, shared how you can use assistive technologies to open your club experience to more young people. Watch Rhodri’s talk for some fantastic tips on how assistive technology can make Code Club accessible to children of all ages and abilities.
Dave Morley, who volunteers at the CoderDojo at Royal Museums Greenwich, presented his way of using Scratch projects to keep engaging Dojo participants. Watch Dave’s talk for tips on how to create your own coding projects for young people.
Tim Duffey, who is part of the West Sound CoderDojo, shared how his Dojo ran successful online sessions during the coronavirus pandemic. Watch Tim’s talk for great advice on how to run successful coding clubs for young people online.
Steph Burton from our team presented new resources we’re working on to help clubs recruit and train volunteers. Watch Steph’s talk for tips on how to recruit new volunteers for your coding club.
Engaging young people in your club
Sophie Hudson, who runs a Code Club in rural Yorkshire, told us how her school’s Code Club turned taking part in Astro Pi Mission Zero into a cross-curricular activity, and how she partnered older learners with younger ones for peer mentoring that engaged new learners in coding. Watch Sophie’s talk to learn how you can get your school involved in Astro Pi, especially if you don’t have much adult support available.
We brought a replica of the Astro Pi computers to the Clubs Conference.
Helen Gardner from our team shared how you can motivate and inspire your coders by supporting them to share their projects in the Coolest Projects showcase — even their very first Scratch animation. Watch Helen’s talk if you’re looking for something new for your club.
The benefits of Code Club and CoderDojo for your community
Fiona Lindsay, who leads a Code Club, presented her insights into the skills beyond coding that young people learn at Code Club, and she shared some wonderful videos of her coders talking about their experience. Watch Fiona’s talk to hear young girls talk about how to get more girls into coding, and for evidence of why every school should have a Code Club.
Last year, Fiona’s Code Club held a special event to celebrate the tenth birthday of Code Club.
Bruce Harms, who is involved in AruCoderDojo, shared how he and his team are making the CoderDojo model part of their wider work to bring digital skills and infrastructure to Aruba. Watch Bruce’s talk to learn how his team has tailored their coding clubs for their local community.
What is volunteering for CoderDojo and Code Club like?
Marcus Davage, who volunteers at a Code Club, shared his journey as a volunteer translator of our resources, and how he engaged colleagues at his workplace in also supporting translations to make coding skills available to more young people across the world. Watch Marcus’s talk if you speak more than one language.
To end the day, we hosted a group of community members onstage to have a chat about their journeys with CoderDojo and Code Club, what they’ve learned, and how they see the future of their clubs. Watch the panel conversation if you want inspiration and advice for getting involved in helping kids create with tech.
Thank you to everyone who gave talks, ran workshops, presented posters, and had conversations to share their questions and insights. It was wonderful to meet all of you, and we came away from the Clubs Conference feeling super inspired by the amazing work Code Club and CoderDojo volunteers all over the world do to help young people learn to create with digital technologies.
We learned so much from listening to you, and we will take the lessons into our work to support you and your clubs in the best way we can.
We meet many young people with an astounding passion for tech, and we also meet the incredible volunteers and educators who help them find their feet in the digital world. Our series of community stories is one way we share their journeys with you.
Today we’re introducing you to Nadia from Maysan, Iraq. Nadia’s achievements speak for themselves, and we encourage you to watch her video to see some of the remarkable things she has accomplished.
Say hello to Nadia
Nadia’s journey with the Raspberry Pi Foundation started when she moved to England to pursue a PhD at Brunel University. As an international student, she wanted to find a way to be part of the local community and make the most of her time abroad. Through her university’s volunteer department, she was introduced to Code Club and began supporting club sessions for children in her local library. The opportunity to share her personal passion for all things computer science and coding with young people felt like the perfect fit.
“[Code Club] added to my skills. And at the same time, I was able to share my expertise with the young children and to learn from them as well.”
Nadia Al-Aboody
Soon, Nadia saw that the skills young people learned at her Code Club weren’t just technical, but included team building and communication as well. That’s when she realised she needed to take Code Club with her when she moved back home to Iraq.
A Code Club in every school in Iraq
With personal awareness of just how important it is to encourage girls to engage with computing and digital technologies, Nadia set about training the Code Club network’s first female-only training team. Her group of 15 trainers now runs nine clubs — and counting— throughout Iraq, with their goal being to open a club in every single school in the country.
Reaching new areas can be a challenge, one that Nadia is addressing by using Code Club resources offline:
“Not every child has a smartphone or a device, and that was one of the biggest challenges. The [Raspberry Pi] Foundation also introduced the unplugged activities, which was amazing. It was very important to us because we can teach computer science without the need for a computer or a smart device.”
Nadia Al-Aboody
Nadia also works with a team of other volunteers to translate our free resources related to Code Club and other initiatives for young people into Arabic, making them accessible to many more young people around the world.
Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club here at the Foundation, shares just how important volunteers like Nadia are in actively pushing our shared mission forwards.
“Volunteers like Nadia really show us why we do the work we do. Our Code Club team exists to support volunteers who are out there on the ground, making a real difference to young people. Nadia is a true champion for Code Club, and goes out of her way to help give more children access to learning about computing. By translating resources, alongside overseeing a growing network of clubs, she helps to support more volunteers and, in turn, reach more young people. Having Nadia as a member of the community is really valuable.”
Tamasin Greenough Graham, Head of Code Club
If you are interested in becoming a Code Club volunteer, visit codeclub.org for all the information you need to get started.
Help us celebrate Nadia and her commendable commitment to growing the Code Club community in Iraq by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Can you monitor your website visitor rate with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am 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 this website hosted in a domain hotel, and among other features, the admin panel has some standard website access log analyzers (such as awstats) available for me to see the activity of this site. That’s cool, but also boringly easy, and requires me to log in to that admin panel instead of me using my trusted single pane of glass that is Zabbix.
Let’s connect to site logs
If I log in to my site over ssh/sftp, my home directory has a preconfigured access_logs directory. Like the name says, it contains the website access logs in the usual format you would expect it to be:
That’s great, but how to monitor that in real time with Zabbix? Let’s use sshfs — it’s like NFS or CIFS, but allows you to mount stuff over ssh. On my dear Raspberry Pi 4, which runs my Zabbix, running
did mount my remote server access_logs directory perfectly fine.
Time for monitoring
Now that we have our log file, the rest is very straightforward and standard log file monitoring. First, let’s add a master item that reads the log.
Nothing too difficult yet.
Next, let’s add a dependent item that grabs the visitor IP address part from a log line.
… and some item preprocessing to grab only the IP
Items
Sorry about that ugly regular expression.
… after adding a few more items, here’s my template.
I’m currently not parsing the referrer, exact URL, or user-agent values, as for the most part those would just add unnecessary noise and load for my poor little home Zabbix.
Dashboard time!
So, finally, I created a dashboard showing the number of unique IP addresses & hits during the past 24 hours and some graphs. Now that I’ve not posted any posts in a while, welcome to Tumbleweedville!
It’s so silent in here that I can hear my own typing.
After publishing this post, I’ll wait for a while and then update the post with a new screenshot, so we’ll get to see the incredible visitor surge that will be counted in at least tens of new IP addresses.
Update #1 about 15 minutes after publishing the post
Clearly some movement in the access log needle!
Update #2 about 15 minutes after publishing the post
Almost 400 unique IP addresses already? Hello, dear readers and bots.
Update #3 about 15 minutes after publishing the post
Even though IP addresses are a bad way to measure the actual amount of visitors, roughly 400 unique new addresses after publishing my post are very good. Thanks, bots and readers!
This post was originally published on the author’s page.
While 14 March is an opportunity for our American friends to celebrate the mathematical constant Pi, we are also very happy to make this day a chance to say a massive thank you to everyone who supports the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s work through their generous donations.
You may know that the Raspberry Pi story started in Cambridge, UK, in 2008 when a group of engineers-cum-entrepreuers set out to improve computing education by inventing a programmable computer for the price of a textbook.
Fast forward 15 years and there are 50 million Raspberry Pi computers in the world, being used to revolutionise education and industry alike. Removing price as a barrier for anyone to own a powerful, general-purpose computer will always be an important part of our mission to democratise access to computing.
What we also know today is that access to low-cost, high-quality hardware is essential, but it’s not enough.
If we want all young people to be able to take advantage of the potential offered by technological innovation, then we also need to support teachers to introduce computing in schools, find ways to inspire young people to learn outside of their formal education, and make sure that everything we do is informed by rigorous research.
That’s the focus of our educational mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and we couldn’t do this work without your support.
What we achieve for young people thanks to your support
We are fortunate that a large and growing community of people, corporations, trusts, and foundations makes very generous donations to support our educational mission. It’s thanks to you that we are able to achieve what we do for young people and educators:
In 2022 alone, over 3.54m people engaged with our free online learning resources for young people, including brand-new pathways of projects for HTML/CSS, Python, and Raspberry Pi Pico.
Supported by us, more than 4500 Code Club and CoderDojos are running in 103 countries, and an additional 2891 clubs that were disrupted by the coronavirus pandemic tell us that they are actively planning to start running sessions for young people again soon.
We engaged over 30,000 young people in challenges such as Astro Pi and Coolest Projects, enabling them to showcase their skills, think about how to solve problems using technology, and connect with like-minded peers.
We have supported tens of thousands of computing teachers through our curriculum, resources, and online training. For example, The Computing Curriculum, which we developed as part of the National Centre for Computing Education in England, is now being used by educators all over the world, with 1.7m global downloads in 2022.
We completed and published the findings of the world’s largest-ever research programme testing how to improve the gender balance in computing. We are now working on integrating the insights from the programme into our own work and making them accessible and actionable for practitioners.
Trust me when I say this is just a small selection of highlights, all of which are made possible by our amazing supporters. Thank you, and I hope that we made you proud.
Get involved today
If you haven’t yet made a donation to our Pi Day campaign, it’s not too late to get involved. Your donation will help inspire the next generation of digital technology creators.
Is Raspberry Pi 4 a goodbye or a good buy for running Zabbix? How is it performance-wise? Is it reliable? Here’s my nine-month review of it, with a splash of appliance/application performance monitoring.
In about April 2022 when it became clear that I am going to continue my home monitoring project, I bought a Raspberry Pi 4 to run the show. Here’s my opinion on how well it is suited for running Zabbix.
Installing Zabbix
Applying that delicious layer of Zabbix on top of your Raspberry Pi 4 cake is extremely straightforward, as just like for every other platform that Zabbix officially supports, they do have packages and instructions to set up what you’d like to run.
So many options to choose from!
After installing the packages, the next steps are just like with Zabbix running on any other platform, so I am not going to dive into that now.
Modifications to my Raspberry setup
As I do not need to run a graphical environment on my Raspberry, I did disable the graphical environment from starting at all to save some precious RAM and other resources.
After some time I did also purchase an external USB hard disk, as the memory card from where Raspberry Pi 4 runs its OS is not very snappy, especially with write operations, and can also run tight on free space.
Other than that, my Raspberry Pi 4 is running pretty much by default.
How about the performance?
The graphs that you are about to see are from nine months period of time, as that’s about as long I have had the device.
No problem with the CPU usage. It’s been creeping up a little bit over time though, as I have been adding new items to monitoring and also additional software, such as HomeBridge and Home Assistant.
It still has available memory, even though the device runs Zabbix server, MariaDB, Grafana, Mosquitto, Home Assistant and HomeBridge.
As you can see, the number of running processes has grown significantly as I have been adding other stuff than Zabbix.
It’s easy to see when I did switch from an internal memory card to an external USB drive. The disk I/O utilization percentage is hovering at very tolerable levels.
I/O latency has remained about the same.
With only Zabbix, MariaDB and Grafana running the device remained around the 55-60C area, but has been warming to about 70C with the additional software. Still not too bad.
Splash of APM
Have you ever wondered what happens to the memory usage of a wrapper shell script that runs other scripts in a loop and keeps doing that until it’s manually stopped? This happens, it’s boringly stable. The results are brought you to by Zabbix Agent 2 process discovery.
Really, it does not vary much.
But as I have been adding new stuff, clearly the OS needs to do some more swapping and even the script has more page faults than before.
There’s more than that to process discovery, but those were some examples.
Zabbix server itself is doing very well, here are some example stats.
My conclusion: Raspberry Pi 4 is an excellent Zabbix server for smaller environments and a very good Zabbix proxy candidate. It’s been rock solid.
This post was originally published on the author’s page.
Can you follow the news with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a lead site reliability engineer at a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and do some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my blog about the project.
A long time ago, before the dawn of social media, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) readers were all the rave. Instead of visiting each site you followed individually, you could add their RSS feeds to your RSS reader, which then would show you the latest news titles from as many sources as you wanted. Not only the titles, but depending on the news site you could also read a teaser or even the full news through your RSS reader without ever visiting the site itself.
Is RSS still a thing?
This was all good for the end-users, but the beancounters at the news companies got worried, as of course without visits to news sites, the advertisement income would come down, too. RSS readers can still be useful, but…. oh, I’ll need to stop, this is not the scope of this blog post.
Instead, the underlying technology of RSS is what makes it interesting. It’s just XML, so easy to consume by whatever software. Even though RSS is not a media darling anymore, it’s useful for gathering info from various sources to be then utilized somewhere else — like in Zabbix.
Let’s follow this site
So, how to follow the latest posts on this site through Zabbix? Easy, as this is just about parsing some XML.
Let’s begin with adding a new HTTP agent item.
With that in place, let’s add some dependent items, with the end result being this:
Each of those is just dependent items with some item pre-processing — the example below parses the first occurrence of title to the text.
How to use this?
In this case, I created a separate dashboard to show the latest blog post title, a link to it and the publication date. Wouldn’t be too hard to create a custom Zabbix module to make this fancier, but let’s leave it for another day. For now, by just using Item value widget types, we get this.
In the real world, there are plenty of actual use cases. Use it to alert you about the latest vulnerabilities, updates or other news about the stuff you have in your environment. Create a news dashboard for your security operations team or developers. If your own products do utilize RSS for something, this also can be very handy for end-to-end testing, as both Zabbix and your eyes can spot visually if something is not right. I’m sure you can come up with more and better ideas.
I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and never get tired of the news. — Janne Pikkarainen
This post was originally published on the author’s page.
One of the features of Zabbix proxy is that it can buffer the collected monitoring data if connectivity to Zabbix server is lost. In this post I will show it happening, using packet capture, or packet analysis.
Zabbix setup and capturing Zabbix proxy traffic
This is the setup in this demo:
One Zabbix server in the central site (IPv6 address 2001:db8:1234::bebe and DNS name zabbixtest.lein.io)
One Zabbix proxy “Proxy-1” in a remote site (IPv6 address 2001:db8:9876::fafa and IPv4 address 10.0.41.65)
One Zabbix agent “Testhost” on a server in the remote site, sending data via the proxy
For simplicity, the agent only monitors one item: the system uptime (item key system.uptime using Zabbix active agent), with 20 seconds interval. So that’s the data that we are expecting to arrive to the server, every 20 seconds.
The proxy is an active proxy using SQLite database, with these non-default configurations in the configuration file:
The proxy “Proxy-1” has also been added in Zabbix server using the frontend.
I’m using Zabbix server and proxy version 6.4.0beta5 here. Agents are normally compatible with newer servers and proxies, so I happened to use an existing agent that was version 4.0.44.
With this setup successfully running, I started packet capture on the Zabbix server, capturing only packets for the proxy communication:
After having it running for a couple of minutes, I introduced a “network outage” by dropping the packets from the proxy in the server:
sudo ip6tables -A INPUT -s 2001:db8:9876::fafa -j DROP
I kept that drop rule in use for a few minutes and then deleted it with a suitable ip6tables command (sudo ip6tables -D INPUT 1 in this case), and stopped the capture some time after that.
Analyzing the captured Zabbix traffic with Wireshark
I downloaded the capture file (proxybuffer.pcap) to my workstation where I already had Wireshark installed. I also had the Zabbix dissector for Wireshark installed. Without this specific dissector the Zabbix packet contents are just unreadable binary data because the proxy communication is compressed since Zabbix version 4.0.
You can download the same capture file here if you want to follow along:
After opening the capture file in Wireshark I first entered zabbix in the display filter, expanded the Zabbix fields in the protocol tree a bit, and this is what I got:
Since this is an active proxy communicating with the server, there is always first a packet from the proxy (config request or data to be sent) and then the response from the server.
Let’s look at the packets from the proxy only. We get that by adding the proxy source IP address in the filter (by typing it to the field as an ipv6.src filter, or by dragging the IP address from the Source column to the display filter like I did):
Basically there are two types of packets shown:
Proxy data
Request proxy config
The configuration requests are easier to explain: in Zabbix proxy 6.4 there is a configuration parameter ProxyConfigFrequency (in earlier Zabbix versions the same was called ConfigFrequency):
It defaults to 10 seconds. What basically happens in each config request is that the proxy says “my current configuration revision is 1234”, and then the server responds to that.
Note: The configuration request concept has been changed in Zabbix 6.4 to use incremental configurations when possible, so the proxy is allowed to get the updated configuration much faster compared to earlier default of 3600 seconds or one hour in Zabbix 6.2 and earlier. See What’s new in Zabbix 6.4.0 for more information.
The other packet type shown above is the proxy data packet. It is actually also used for other than data. In proxy configuration there is a parameter DataSenderFrequency:
The default value for it is one second. But as mentioned in the quote above, even if you increase the configuration value (= actually decrease the frequency… but it is what it is), the proxy will connect to the server every second anyway.
Note: There is a feature request ZBXNEXT-4998 about making the task update interval configurable. Vote and watch that issue if you are interested in that for example for battery-powered Zabbix use cases.
The first packet shown above is (JSON reformatted for better readability):
There is no “data” in the packet, that’s just the proxy basically saying “hey I’m still here!” to the server so that the server has an opportunity to talk back to the proxy if it has something to say, like a remote command to run on the proxy or on any hosts monitored by the proxy.
As mentioned earlier, the test setup consisted of only one collected item, and that is being collected every 20 seconds, so it is natural that not all data packets contain monitoring data.
I’m further filtering the packets to show only the proxy data packets by adding zabbix.proxy.data in the display filter (by dragging the “Proxy Data: True” field to the filter):
(Yes yes, the topic of this post is data buffering in Zabbix proxy, and we are getting there soon)
Now, there is about 20 seconds worth of packets shown, so we should have one actual data packet there, and there it is, the packet number 176: it is about 50 bytes larger than other packets so there must be something. Here is the Data field contents of that packet:
In addition to the earlier fields there is now a list called history data containing one object. That object has fields like itemid and value. The itemid field has the actual item ID for the monitored item, it can be seen in the URL address in the browser when editing the item in Zabbix frontend. The value 1686 is the actual value of the monitored item (the system uptime in seconds, the host was rebooted about 28 minutes ago).
Let’s develop the display filter even more. Now that we are quite confident that packets that have TCP length of about 136-138 bytes are just the empty data packets without item data, we can get the interesting data packets by adding tcp.len > 140 in the display filter:
When looking at the packet timestamps there is the 20-second interval observed until about 17:08:30. Then there is about 3.5 minutes gap, next send at 17:11:53, and then the data was flowing again with the 20-second interval. The 3.5 minutes gap corresponds to the network outage that was manually caused in the test. The data packet immediately after the outage is larger than others, so let’s see that:
What we see here is that there are several history data objects in the same data packet from the proxy. The itemid field is still the same as earlier (44592), and the value field is increasing in 20-second steps. Also the timestamps (clock and nanoseconds) are increasing correspondingly, so we see when the values were actually collected, even though they were sent to the server only a few minutes later, having been buffered by the proxy.
That is also confirmed by looking at the Latest data graph in Zabbix frontend for that item during the time of the test:
There is a nice increasing graph with no gaps or jagged edges.
By the way, this is how the outage looked like in the Zabbix proxy log (/var/log/zabbix/zabbix_proxy.log on the proxy):
738:20230108:170835.557 Unable to connect to [zabbixtest.lein.io]:10051 [cannot connect to [[zabbixtest.lein.io]:10051]: [4] Interrupted system call]
738:20230108:170835.558 Will try to reconnect every 120 second(s)
748:20230108:170835.970 Unable to connect to [zabbixtest.lein.io]:10051 [cannot connect to [[zabbixtest.lein.io]:10051]: [4] Interrupted system call]
748:20230108:170835.970 Will try to reconnect every 1 second(s)
748:20230108:170939.993 Still unable to connect...
748:20230108:171040.015 Still unable to connect...
738:20230108:171043.561 Still unable to connect...
748:20230108:171140.068 Still unable to connect...
748:20230108:171147.105 Connection restored.
738:20230108:171243.563 Connection restored.
The log looks confusing at first because it shows the messages twice. Also, the second “Connection restored” message arrived almost one minute after the data sending was already restored, as proved in the packet list earlier. The explanation is (as far as I understand it) that the configuration syncer and data sender are separate processes in the proxy, as described in https://www.zabbix.com/documentation/devel/en/manual/concepts/proxy#proxy-process-types. When looking at the packets we see that at 17:12:43 (when the second “Connection restored” message arrived) the proxy sent a proxy config request to the server, so apparently the data sender tries to reconnect every second (to facilitate fast recovery for monitoring data), while the config syncer only tries every two minutes (based on the “Will try to reconnect every 120 second(s)” message, and that corresponds to the outage start time 17:08:35 plus 2 x 2 minutes, plus some extra seconds, presumably because of TCP timeouts).
There were no messages on the Zabbix server log (/var/log/zabbix/zabbix_server.log) for this outage as the outage did not happen in the middle of the TCP session and the proxy was in active mode (= connections are always initiated by the proxy, not by the server), so there was nothing special to log in the Zabbix server process log.
Configurations for the proxy data buffering
In the configuration file for Zabbix proxy 6.4 there are two configuration parameters that control the buffering: ProxyLocalBuffer
The ProxyOfflineBuffer parameter is the important one. If you need to tolerate longer outages than one hour between the proxy and the Zabbix server (and you have enough disk storage on the proxy), you can increase the value. There is no separate filename or path to configure because proxy uses the dedicated database (configured when installed the proxy) for storing the buffered data.
The ProxyLocalBuffer parameter is uninteresting for most (and disabled by default) because that’s only useful if you plan to fetch the collected data directly from the proxy database into some other external application, and you need to have some flexibility for scheduling the data retrievals from the database.
This post was originally published on the author’s blog.
Coolest Projects is an online showcase celebrating all young people who create with digital technology. From today, Monday 6 February, young people can register their projects on the Coolest Projects website. Registered projects will be part of the online showcase gallery, for people all over the world to see.
By entering your digital tech creations into Coolest Projects, you’ll have the chance to get personalised feedback about your project, represent your country in the online showcase, and get fun, limited-edition swag. Your project could even be selected as a favourite by our very special VIP judges.
What you need to know about Coolest Projects
Coolest Projects is an online celebration of young digital tech creators worldwide, their skills, and their wonderful creative ideas. We welcome all kinds of projects, from big to small, beginner to advanced, and work in progress to completed creation.
Here’s what you need to know:
Coolest Projects is all online and completely free
All digital technology projects are welcome, from very first projects to advanced builds, and they don’t have to be complete
Young creators up to age 18 from anywhere in the world can take part individually or in teams of up to five friends
Projects can be registered in one of six categories: Scratch, games, web, mobile apps, hardware, and advanced programming
Registration is now open and closes on 26 April 2023
All creators, mentors, volunteers, teachers, parents, and supporters are invited to the special celebration livestream on 6 June 2023
There are loads more announcements to come, so make sure to subscribe to the Coolest Projects newsletter to be the first to find out about this year’s VIP judges, limited-edition digital swag, and much more.
Can you detect a crying baby with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a monitoring tech lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and do some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my blog about the project.
Time really flies. Our little baby girl at home is already about three and a half months old, and that shows in so many ways. If during her first month or two she cried quite a lot and quite easily due gassy stomach and whatnot, she nowadays mostly is a chill mini-human just observing the world.
Which then raised the question for me — how often she cries? Could I monitor that? Oh yes. And oh no. We’ll get to no part later, but let’s start with the good bits.
Hey Siri, help me
As I pretty much always have my iPhone with or near me, and wear my Apple Watch nearly 24×7, I thought I would give their sound recognition abilities a try.
To start, I opened the Settings on my iPhone and went to Accessibility → Sound recognition → Baby crying and enabled that.
Next, I opened Shortcuts and created a new Personal automation.
Here’s the advanced CRYENGINE in action.
So, every time my iDevice thinks that our baby is crying, it appends to a text file stored on my iCloud account.
Zabbix Time!
How to get that data to Zabbix?
I have a MacBook Pro and a Zabbix agent running on that, so the next natural step was to make it monitor that particular text file. There would be so many ways to detect if this file has been changed; as I’m appending to the text file, I just made Zabbix keep an eye on the file size.
How does that look like on my graphs? Not so surprisingly, the value changes.
I also set up a simple trigger that screams if the file size has changed since the last check.
The result? Well, here’s some alert history.
Sleep Learn Adapt reporting
I also added our baby as a Service to my Zabbix, just because it was too fun to skip as the terminology involves child services, parent services and such.
And here’s a totally inaccurate and unmeaningful SLA report about her.
The wobbly bits
Just like our baby is still clumsy and has a lot to learn, it seems that Siri is like that too when it comes to detecting emotions. Yes, Siri can detect if our baby is crying, but it also easily gets worried whenever our baby makes loud joyful sounds. It reminds me of the golden times when T-800 practiced smiling. It just doesn’t know or understand human feelings. At least, not yet.
Then the other odd part is that about one day after I enabled the cry detection on my iPhone, it’s not doing it anymore. Did the detection process crash? Probably. I have not restarted my iPhone yet, because I just could not bother to do that yet. But, in theory, we can detect a crying baby, or many more usual sounds like a doorbell, a dog barking just by using Siri and Zabbix.
I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and I think my human skills still beat the ones Siri has. — Janne Pikkarainen
This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.
When we think about a celebration, we also think about how important it is to be intentional about sound. And with this month of February being a celebration of Black history in the USA, we want to help you make some noise to amplify the voices, experiences, and achievements of the Black community.
From the past and present, to those still to come in the future, countless remarkable achievements have been made by Black individuals who have chosen to move to the beat of their own drum. Music and sound can be tools to tell stories, to express ourselves, to promote change, to celebrate, and so much more. So take some time this month to make your own music with your young coders and start dancing.
Of course, choosing to dance is not the same as choosing to devote your life to the equality and freedom of all people. But it reminds us that you can incite change by choosing to do what is right, even when you feel like you’re the only one moving to the music. It won’t be long before you see change and meet people you resonate with, and a new sound will develop in which everyone can find their rhythm.
So join us this month as we explore the power of code and music to celebrate Black History Month.
Projects to help you find your rhythm
We’ve selected three of our favourite music-related projects to help you bring a joyful atmosphere to your coding sessions this month. All of the projects are in Scratch, a programming language that uses blocks to help young people develop their confidence in computer programming while they experiment with colours and sounds to make their own projects.
Find your rhythm with this clicker game where you earn points by playing the drums in different venues. The project is one of our Explore projects and it includes step-by-step instructions to help young creators develop their skills, confidence, and interest in programming. This makes it a great option for beginners who want to get started with Scratch and programming.
Code to the beat of your own drum — or any instrument you like. Use this project to create your own virtual musical instrument and celebrate a Black musician you admire. For young people who have some experience with Scratch, they may enjoy expressing themselves with this Design project. Our Design projects give young people support to build on their experience to gain more independence coding their own ideas.
Can you keep up with the beat? Prove it in this game where you play the notes of a song while they scroll down the screen. You could choose to include a song associated with a moment in Black history that is meaningful to you. This project is a great opportunity for young people to expand their programming knowledge to create lists, while they also test their reaction skills with a fun game.
For young creators who want to create projects that don’t involve music or sound, check out these projects which can help you to:
Code a book about an inspirational figure in Black history (Scratch)
Learn about our partnership with Team4Tech and Kenya Connect, with whom we are empowering educators and students in rural Kenya to use the power of coding and computing to benefit their communities.
I Belong in Computer Science: Salome Tirado Okeze
Meet Salome, a computer science student from the UK who shares her experiences and advice for young people interested in finding out where computer science can lead them. Salome was one of the first people we interviewed for our ‘I belong’ campaign to celebrate young role models in computer science.
Research to help set the tone
We believe that creating inclusive and equitable learning environments is essential to supporting all young people to see computer science as an opportunity for them. To help engage young people, especially those who are underrepresented in computer science classrooms, we are carrying out research with teachers to make computing culturally relevant. Our work promoting culturally relevant pedagogyin educational settings in England has been impacted by projects of many US researchers who have already contributed heavily to this area. You can learn about two of these projects in this blog post.
Educators who want to find out how they can use culturally relevant pedagogy with their learners can download our free guidelines today.
We would also like to invite you to our monthly research seminar on 7 February 2023, when we will be joined by Dr Jean Salac who will be sharing their research on Moving from equity to justice in computing instruction for youth. Dr Salac’s session is part of our current series of seminars that centres on primary school (K–5) teaching and learning of computing. The seminars are free and open to everyone interested in computing education. We hope to see you there!
In this blog post, you will learn how to set up monitoring for your Litter Robot 3. There’s some amazing community scripts already available to connect to the Litter Robot through a selfmade API, which we’ll be using in combination with some Python scripts and Zabbix.
Introduction
Technology is everywhere. On the streets, in our offices and even in our houses. This also means that many people have ‘smart’ lighting, fridges, cameras and a lot more. Personally, I have avoided these home automations for a long time, deeming them time-consuming. But, I think any IT Engineer sometimes feels there is a need to build and automate more and more. Thus, my house has also had a bit of smart home make-over and I’ve started setting up Zabbix at home to monitor everything ‘smart’.
One of the things I cannot live without in our house is our smart litterbox. It keeps the litterbox clean and the smell in the house nice, as well as it provides some very useful insights into my cats ‘potty’ behaviour. One of my cats “Jerry” has some issues with Feline Urinary Tract Disease (FLUTD). This has led Jerry to have some odd litterbox usage, which in his case can be fatal if not treated early on.
So, let’s bring Zabbix into the mix! Even though the Litter Robot has an app where I can see the usage, I want to be able to receive alerts from Zabbix if the Litter Robot usage goes over a certain threshold. Alerting me early on if issues might be arising again. Let’s set things up.
How to
Setting up the script
To make this all possible, we will need to get some information from our Litter Robot or Litter Robots if we have more than one in our account. There’s no official documented API available for the Litter Robot, but there is a way to get information from the device by connecting to the Whisker services. To make things easy for us, we’ll be using a community-made Python library to set up the connection and execute some functions:
https://github.com/natekspencer/pylitterbot
This library contains a number of functions that we can utilize to get information from the Litterbox, but also to make changes to it:
refresh()
start_cleaning()
reset_settings()
set_panel_lockout()
set_night_light()
set_power_status()
set_sleep_mode()
set_wait_time()
set_name()
reset_waste_drawer()
get_activity_history()
get_insight()
Utilizing this library we’ve made some scripts available at the Github page below.
These scripts will have to be executed by Zabbix server’s (or proxy’s) local Zabbix agent, and thus we’ll also have to download the correct UserParameter files.
cd /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agent2.d/
or
cd /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.d/
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/OpensourceICTSolutions/zabbix-litterrobot/main/litterrobot_userparams.conf
Then, we have to make sure that the Zabbix agent will be able to use these new parameters by enabling unsafe user parameter option (since there is an @ in the username). Edit /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agent2.conf or /etc/zabbix/zabbix_agentd.conf and add the following:
UnsafeUserParameters=1
Then we restart the agent with the following command:
systemctl restart zabbix-agent
or
systemctl restart zabbix-agent2
Setting up Zabbix
With the scripts in place and the Zabbix agent ready to execute them, we can set up our monitoring in the Zabbix frontend. To do this, we will have to download and import the template. You can find the 6.2 version template here: https://github.com/OpensourceICTSolutions/zabbix-litterrobot/blob/main/zabbix_litterrobot_python_template.yaml
After downloading the template, import it into Zabbix.
Create a new host for your Litter Robot:
Then make sure to add your username and password as macros:
The result
The result is that we can now find all of our important information about the Litter Robot 3 in Zabbix:
Not only that, after we have an idea of how many times per day our cat(s) usually go to the toilet we can start to use the triggers:
There’s a message for when the drawer is full, but also a Warning and High trigger for when there are more than 12 or 15 cycles respectively. This is a default set for my two cats, your cats might have different potty behavior – update your macros accordingly.
As well as create some useful graphs:
Conclusion
Our pets are a big part of our life and sometimes it can be hard to communicate with them. Cats are very likely to hide their feelings, but one of the telling signs something is wrong with them is the number of times they visit the litterbox. Jerry has had a hard time, but our Litter Robot has helped us and our veterinary keep an eye on him to get ahead of his FLUTD. Using Zabbix we can keep Jerry out of surgery as much as possible.
And keep both (Midna on the left, Jerry on the right) of them racing through the house and enjoying all of their 9 lives.
I hope you enjoyed reading this blog post and if you have any questions or need help configuring anything in your Zabbix setup feel free to contact me and the team at Opensource ICT Solutions. We build a ton of cool integrations like this and much more!
When configuring monitoring and using templates in Zabbix you often see low-level discovery (LLD) used for finding out the monitored components or features of a host. In this post, I will explain how user macros and regular expressions are used in LLD for filtering the discovery results.
I’m using the Network Generic Device by SNMP template as an example. (Note that by using the dropdown menu in the top of that linked page you can select the Zabbix version you are using. It defaults to Master, which means the latest Zabbix version that is being developed, currently 6.4.)
Let’s see the Network interfaces discovery rule and specifically the Filters tab:
All these filters use regular expressions to match (or not match) the LLD macro value. For example:
{#IFNAME} matches {$NET.IF.IFNAME.MATCHES}
These are the macros defined in the template:
There we see that {$NET.IF.IFNAME.MATCHES} is defined with a value: ^.*$
That is a regular expression (often called regexp or regex). I won’t try to make this post a full regular expression tutorial, but there is:
^ = match the beginning of the string
. = match any single character
* = match zero or more occurrences of the previous element (which is any character in this case)
$ = match the end of the string
Basically, that means: “match any kind of string, empty or not”
(In this case a shorter .* would mean the exact same thing, but that’s how the template was configured when I downloaded it.)
When the discovery runs, it finds all network interfaces and assigns values to all of the LLD macros (like the interface name to {#IFNAME}), and then the filters are tested.
In the LLD filters Type of calculation is usually set to “And” (see the first screenshot), so that all filters need to be true for the interface to be discovered (in other words, if any of the filters is false, then no item is created for that interface).
If you want to change the filtering by modifying the macros, here is the thing:
You don’t modify the macros in the template.
You should modify the macros in the host that is using the template.
When you go to the Macros tab on your host, there is the Inherited and host macros button. After clicking it, you will also see all macros that are defined in the templates that the host is using:
You can click the Change link for any of the macros to enter a new value for that macro, and that value will then be used for everything for this host. The value in the template will thus act as a default value that is used whenever there is no other value set at the host level.
If you for example want to discover only interfaces that start with “wan”, “lan” or “vlan”, you can use this regexp in {$NET.IF.IFNAME.MATCHES} macro (again, change it in the host macros, not in the template): ^(wan|lan|vlan)
It means:
match “wan”, “lan” or “vlan”
but only if they are in the beginning of the string.
This is the same, just grouped differently: (^wan|^lan|^vlan)
If you at the same time want to exclude interface “vlan999”, you can use {$NET.IF.IFNAME.NOT_MATCHES} macro for that (note the “does not match” selection in the LLD filters list). The default value for that macro is:
Quite a mouthful, but it is basically a long list of “or” patterns separated by the vertical bar (|). You can add your own exclusion there inside the parenthesis, separated by |, or if you know that’s the only thing you want to exclude in that particular host, you can just replace the whole string with ^vlan999$ to exclude only vlan999 (and not for example lan999 or vlan9999). Note the use of ^ and $ to make sure it only matches the full interface name, not any partial names.
A common “not matches” macro value for me is something like this: ^(Nu|Tunnel|Loopback|VoIP)
It will exclude all those Null0, Loopback0 and other virtual interfaces that may exist on the device by default but won’t usually be useful in Zabbix statistics. I will always exclude these kinds of interfaces to reduce polling intensity and save database capacity.
It should also be said that all these regular expressions are case-sensitive, so use upper case or lower case as appropriate in your particular device, or expand the regexp to include various syntaxes as needed.
To conclude: When you want to reconfigure the discovery for a host:
See the filters that are used in the discovery rule
Check which macros are used in the filters
In the host you are configuring, change the macro values to achieve the desired filtering results.
This post was originally published on the author’s blog.
In our work, we get to meet so many super inspiring young people who make things with technology. Our series of community stories is one way we share their journeys and enthusiasm for digital making with you.
Today we’re introducing you to Adarsh from California, USA.
We first met Adarsh at the Coolest Projects USA showcase in 2019, when he was 15 years old. Adarsh was chosen as the Coolest Projects judges’ favourite in the showcase’s Hardware category for making a Smart Sprinkler System, which can serve an entire community. He was inspired to create this project by the need he saw in California to manage water during a drought. Using a Raspberry Pi computer, he built a moisture sensor–based sprinkler system that integrates real-time weather forecast data and Twitter feeds to dispense only optimum amounts of water, in compliance with city water regulations. Adarsh says:
“The world around us right now has a lot of different problems that need to be solved and so the way that I get inspired is by looking outwards.”
At Coolest Projects 2019At Coolest Projects 2020
In 2020, Coolest Projects Global went online with young people across the world sharing their tech projects, and Adarsh created a project for the showcase to solve another real-life problem he had witnessed. When Adarsh had been in middle school, his mother had to be rushed to hospital with a sudden heart problem. The experience of seeing her hooked up to lots of vital sign monitors, with the wires hindering her movement, stayed in his memory. It led Adarsh to create another tech project: the Contactless Vital Signs Monitor. This low-cost device can be used to monitor a person’s skin temperature, heart rate, respiratory rate, blood pressure, and oxygen saturation without needing to be in direct contact with them. Adarsh’s contactless monitor lets patients rest more comfortably and also keeps healthcare staff safer from infections.
Adarsh and his mother on a walk in their California neighbourhood.
Adarsh entered his Contactless Vital Signs Monitor in the Davidson Fellows Scholarship programme, which recognises students who have completed significant projects that have the potential to benefit society.
Adarsh has this message for other young people who think they might like to try creating things with tech:
“None of these projects, to get to the stage where they are today, were without frustration or difficulties. That’s part of the process. You should expect that. Because of all the struggles I had, the fact that I was able to build all of this is so much more rewarding to me.”
Helping each other solve problems
A big part of coding and digital making is problem-solving and collaboration. Adarsh told us that he had a really great mentor, Johan, who introduced him to coding and Raspberry Pi hardware, and showed him where Adarsh could ask for help online.
“[The Raspberry Pi community] is such a large and inclusive community. It welcomes young students — even older adults who are first starting to develop their interest in computer science — and we all are developing our own skills, our own projects, and our own passions together, and while doing so, we’re helping each other out.”
Adarsh with his mentor Johan.
The future for Adarsh
Now a freshman at Stanford University, Adarsh is currently doing an epidemiology-related research project about the relationship between COVID-19 mutations and environmental, health, and demographic statistics. He wants to focus either on biomedical engineering or environmental engineering in his studies.
“Really [what I’m studying at university] is going to involve engineering or computer science largely due to the Raspberry Pi and the early influence it has had on my life.”
Thanks for inspiring us, Adarsh, and for letting us share your story with the community!
Help us celebrate Adarsh and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram.
Welcome to 2023. I hope that you had a fantastic 2022 and that you’re looking forward to an even better year ahead. To help get the year off to a great start, I thought it might be fun to share a few of the things that we’ve got planned for 2023.
Whether you’re a teacher, a mentor, or a young person, if it’s computer science, coding, or digital skills that you’re looking for, we’ve got you covered.
Your code in space
Through our collaboration with the European Space Agency, theAstro Pi, young people can write computer programs that are guaranteed to run on the Raspberry Pi computers on the International Space Station (terms and conditions apply).
The Raspberry Pi computers on board the ISS (Image: ESA/NASA)
Astro Pi Mission Zero is open to participants until 17 March 2023 and is a perfect introduction to programming in Python for beginners. It takes about an hour to complete and we provide step-by-step guides for teachers, mentors, and young people.
Make a cool project and share it with the world
Kids all over the world are already working on their entries to Coolest Projects Global 2023, our international online showcase that will see thousands of young people share their brilliant tech creations with the world. Registration opens on 6 February and it’s super simple to get involved. If you’re looking for inspiration, why not explore the judges’ favourite projects from 2022?
While we all love the Coolest Projects online showcase, I’m also looking forward to attending more in-person Coolest Projects events in 2023. The word on the street is that members of the Raspberry Pi team have been spotted scouting venues in Ireland… Watch this space.
Experience AI
I am sure I wasn’t alone in disappearing down a ChatGPT rabbit hole at the end of last year after OpenAI made their latest AI chatbot available for free. The internet exploded with both incredible examples of what the chatbot can do and furious debates about the limitations and ethics of AI systems.
With the rapid advances being made in AI technology, it’s increasingly important that young people are able to understand how AI is affecting their lives now and the role that it can play in their future. This year we’ll be building on our research into the future of AI and data science education and launching Experience AI in partnership with leading AI company DeepMind. The first wave of resources and learning experiences will be available in March.
The big Code Club and CoderDojo meetup
With pandemic restrictions now almost completely unwound, we’ve seen a huge resurgence in Code Clubs and CoderDojos meeting all over the world. To build on this momentum, we are delighted to be welcoming Code Club and CoderDojo mentors and educators to a big Clubs Conference in Churchill College in Cambridge on 24 and 25 March.
This will be the first time we’re holding a community get-together since 2019 and a great opportunity to share learning and make new connections.
Building partnerships in India, Kenya, and South Africa
As part of our global mission to ensure that every young person is able to learn how to create with digital technologies, we have been focused on building partnerships in India, Kenya, and South Africa, and that work will be expanding in 2023.
In India we will significantly scale up our work with established partners Mo School and Pratham Education Foundation, training 2000 more teachers in government schools in Odisha, and running 2200 Code Clubs across four states. We will also be launching new partnerships with community-based organisations in Kenya and South Africa, helping them set up networks of Code Clubs and co-designing learning experiences that help them bring computing education to their communities of young people.
Exploring computing education for 5- to 11-year-olds
Over the past few years, our research seminar series has covered computing education topics from diversity and inclusion, to AI and data science. This year, we’re focusing on current questions and research in primary computing education for 5- to 11-year-olds.
As ever, we’re providing a platform for some of the world’s leading researchers to share their insights, and convening a community of educators, researchers, and policy makers to engage in the discussion. The first seminar takes place today (Tuesday 10 January) and it’s not too late to sign up.
And much, much more…
That’s just a few of the super cool things that we’ve got planned for 2023. I haven’t even mentioned the new online projects we’re developing with our friends at Unity, the fun we’ve got planned with our very own online text editor, or what’s next for our curriculum and professional development offer for computing teachers.
As part of our mission to enable young people to realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies, we work in partnership with organisations around the globe to grow and sustain the Code Club and CoderDojo networks of coding clubs for young people. These organisations are our global clubs partners, and they undertake activities including training educators and volunteers, providing access to equipment, and running clubs and events for young people at a local or national level.
Educator training in Benin, run by our global clubs partner Impala Bridge.
Meeting in the middle
Given that many people at the Raspberry Pi Foundation are based in the UK and Ireland, and that meeting in person has been restricted during the coronavirus pandemic, our work to connect with the global clubs partners network has largely taken place via video calls these last years. We don’t only connect with partners one to one, we also link them to each other so they can share insights, approaches, and resources. Video calls offer a unique opportunity for bringing together partner organisations located all over the world, but they provide a very different experience to building community in person.
Our meetup in Malaysia brought together global clubs partners from Malawi, Tanzania, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Vietnam, and Malaysia itself.
With a network of 41 organisations in 35 countries, meeting in person requires careful consideration so we can accommodate as many partners as possible. That’s why we decided to hold several regional meetups in 2022 to make it feasible for all partners to join at least one. In October, a meetup took place in the Netherlands, coinciding with DojoCon Netherlands run by local partners. Our most recent meetup happened in early December, the day before the Coolest Projects Malaysia 2022 event,in Penang on the west coast of Malaysia.
Meetups with global clubs partners are about connection and knowledge sharing.
At the December meetup, we welcomed participants from 10 partner organisations across Asia, Oceania, and Africa. This group spent a whole day building connections and sharing their work with each other. Together we covered several areas of interest, including volunteer recruitment, training, and recognition — all crucial topics for organisations that rely on volunteers to support young people. Meet-up participants shared resources, discussed how to sustainably grow networks, and planned for the future. The next day, participants had the chance to visit Coolest Projects Malaysia to find even more inspiration while seeing local young people showcase their own tech creations.
At Coolest Projects, young people from Code Clubs, CoderDojos, and beyond showcase tech projects they’ve made.
Although it was only one day, the impact of the meetup has been clear. As we had hoped it would, feedback from the partner organisations was very positive and revolved around community and learning, with participants expressing “feeling better connected” and “interconnectedness”, as well as “learning a lot” and “sharing best practices”. One participant even volunteered to host a future meetup, saying “Next year I would like to run this in my country.”
At the meetup, we discussed topics including club volunteer recruitment, training, and recognition.
Here at the Foundation, we very much share these sentiments. Ellie Proffitt, Code Club Global Partnerships Manager, said: “It was great to see our partners sharing how they support their clubs with each other and bouncing new ideas around. I think we all left feeling very inspired.”
Looking to the future
After the success of these in-person meetups in 2022, we and our global clubs partners are looking forward to future opportunities to work together. Planning for 2023 is of course well underway, with creative, ambitious projects and new partnerships in the pipeline. We all feel renewed in our commitment to our work and mission, and excited for what’s on the horizon. In the words of Sonja Bienert, Senior Community Manager: “Through this collaboration, we’ve reached a new level of trust that will positively influence our work for a long time to come.”
You can find out more about joining our global clubs partner community on the CoderDojo and Code Club websites, or contact us directly with your questions or ideas about a partnership.
By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information
The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.
