Tag Archives: community

Celebrating the community: Adarsh

Post Syndicated from Meg Wang original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-the-community-adarsh/

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.

Young tech creator Adarsh with his Raspberry Pi projects.

Meet Adarsh

Help us celebrate Adarsh and inspire other young people by sharing his story on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram.

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.”

Tech creator Adarsh at Coolest Projects 2019.
At Coolest Projects 2019
Tech creator Adarsh at Coolest Projects 2020.
At 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.

Tech creator Adarsh and his mother on a walk in their California neighbourhood.
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.”

Tech creator Adarsh and his mentor Johan.
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.

The post Celebrating the community: Adarsh appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

What to expect from the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2023

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-foundation-plans-2023/

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.

A teacher and learner at a laptop doing coding.

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).

Two Astro Pi units on board the International Space Station.
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?

Five young coders show off their robotic garden tech project for Coolest Projects.

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.

A group of young people investigate computer hardware together.

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.

Workshop attendees at a table.

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.

Two Kenyan educators work on a physical computing project.

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.

A teacher and a learner at a laptop doing coding.

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.

You can sign up to our monthly newsletter to always stay up to date with what we’re working on.

The post What to expect from the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2023 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Building community with our global clubs partners

Post Syndicated from Isabel Ronaldson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/building-community-global-clubs-partners-code-club-coderdojo/

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 a classroom in Benin.
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.

A group of educators.
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.

Workshop attendees stand around a table.
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, a group of people explore a coding project.
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.”

Workshop attendees at a table.
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. 

The post Building community with our global clubs partners appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

What’s Up, Home? – Catching the Northern Lights

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-catching-the-northern-lights/24836/

Can you monitor Northern Lights 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 this project.

Christmas is coming, and (at least if you believe Hollywood movies) part of that magic would be staring at the sky and marvel the Northern Lights. Well, in practice you probably won’t see them, as even if the Northern Lights would be up there, a thick layer of clouds will probably prevent you from seeing them. Or then you live in an area with so many street lights that you don’t see the sky properly.

We have tried to watch them several times with my wife, but our attempts all over the years and all the seasons have failed so far. But, for the sake of the Christmas spirit, let’s imagine you could actually see the lights.

Getting the data

There are probably actual APIs for getting the data — at first, I went to NASA’s open data site but then quickly gave up; there’s so much data that I would not have an actual idea how to start parsing this beautiful sky flames phenomenon.

Admitting my lameness, I next came up with plan B. The Finnish Institute of meteorology has this page for space weather & Northern Lights predictions. Sorry, the page is all in Finnish, so likely it looks like an alien language to you. Anyway, there’s this snippet that shows the probability of Northern Lights tonight (“Tänä yönä”), tomorrow (“Huomenna” and the day after tomorrow (“Ylihuomenna”).

Is that some kind of advanced form of encryption? No, that’s just the Finnish language for you.
Making it work

But how to parse that? Well, of course, with Zabbix, that is easy with the HTTP Agent item type. It allows you to grab website content and then perform all the advanced processing for the data you would expect from Zabbix item preprocessing.

Then, using dependent items — one for tonight, one for tomorrow, one for the day after tomorrow — and item preprocessing we can extract the interesting bits.

And see, it works!

I also created a (still boring-looking) dashboard, which shows me the current values.

The problem I now have is that I don’t know all the values the page could contain — when I created this blog post, the chances of seeing the Northern Lights were small (“pieni”) or smallish (“pienehkö”). Well, I keep checking my dashboard from now on! For now, I could create triggers that would alert me if the values would be something else than “pieni” or “pienehkö”, but did not have time for that yet.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and I bring many Nordic values to the company, even though I’m not lucky with the Northern Lights. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

What’s Up, Home? – Have a Nice Flight!

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-have-a-nice-flight/24755/

Can you monitor the FlightGear flight simulator 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 this project.

FlightGear is an awesome free, open-source flight simulator. I am not a pilot, not even a good virtual pilot, in fact, probably the virtual cabin crew would be chanting “BRACE! BRACE! BRACE! HEAD DOWN! STAY DOWN!” to my virtual passengers. Anyway, learning to fly would be awesome.

But what good would be virtual flying without any monitoring? Most people, they wouldn’t care about monitoring. For me, that’s everything I care about with this experiment.

FlightGear Properties

FlightGear can expose all kinds of flight-related data in many different ways; XML logging and via its built-in HTTP server, for example. This time I used its HTTP server, and cherry-picked only a few values (aircraft latitude, longitude, altitude, and speed), as the complete property list is LONG, and I do not understand most of it.

Anyway, you get the FlightGear HTTP server up and running by launching it like

fgfs –httpd=5480

… where 5480 is the port number where HTTP server will be listening on.

You will then have a property browser available on http://localhost:5480/json/ which is from where I found the values I wanted to harvest for my little experiment to see if this thing would fly.

Adding items to Zabbix

To get these values monitored, I added two new master items to Zabbix: one for velocities and one for the position. Then, dependent items are using those master items.

My latitude/longitude items also do populate the Zabbix inventory latitude/longitude fields for my aircraft.

Does it fly?

Yes, it does. I can now have data about my virtual flight.

And thanks to inventory fields, I can show the location of my virtual aircraft on Zabbix geomap.

If you are a flight simulator enthusiast, feel free to use this technique and possibly gather all the values from FlightGear property browser by using low-level discovery. For my little test, I did not bother.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and have learnt that proper monitoring makes sure your projects do takeoff without too much pain. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

What’s Up, Home? – No More Blackouts with Zabbix HA Cluster

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-no-more-blackouts-with-zabbix-ha-cluster/24738/

Can you have a Zabbix HA cluster at home? 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 this project.

The winter has come, and due to world events, it might bring one to two hours of rolling blackouts here in Finland, too. As I have my home Zabbix running on my Raspberry Pi, without a UPS this would mean my Zabbix possibly could not monitor the actual duration of the outages, as my Zabbix server would be without power, too, right?

No. Thanks to the simplicity of setting up a HA cluster with Zabbix, I now have a two-node Zabbix server setup at home, with the standby node running on my laptop, which of course can run on battery for the duration of the blackout. So, while this post is kind of boring — I’m not introducing anything weird to monitor today — I hope the post encourages you to try out the high-availability features of Zabbix. It’s easy!

Set up the nodes

As written on Zabbix documentation, setting up HA on Zabbix means two additional lines added to your zabbix_server.conf file:

  • HANodeName for the descriptive, unique name of the node
  • NodeAddress, which should be the address Zabbix front-end will then use

That’s it! And, that is what I did. Then make sure your Zabbix servers point to the same database, and that all your Zabbix servers can connect to that database.

But does it work?

Of course, it does! Here’s the status as seen from Zabbix Reports → System Information:

And here’s the status as reported by sudo zabbix_server -R ha_status from the command line on my Raspberry Pi:

Out of curiosity, I tried out what happens if I try the same command on my laptop. This happens:

Still to do

As nowadays due to our baby my time is very limited, I do have one remaining task to make this perfect: to set up a database cluster. For now, MariaDB is running on my Raspberry Pi only, so I would need to spread it to run on my laptop, too. I will most likely do this with MariaDB Galera Cluster, but that will be another story.

Winter, you might take out my electricity, but you won’t take down my Zabbix.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and I won’t let my systems go down. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

Fast Way to Upgrade Your Zabbix Knowledge

Post Syndicated from Nicole Makarova original https://blog.zabbix.com/fast-way-to-upgrade-your-zabbix-knowledge/20267/

Since Zabbix 6.0 LTS has been released with a lot of new features and improvements, it might be tricky for one to figure out how to use these features on their own. Here, Zabbix comes to the rescue with Upgrade Training Courses to boost your knowledge in just one day.

If you previously completed the Zabbix 5.0 core training, the Upgrade Program will be an excellent way to learn about the recent improvements and add-ons of the new version without retaking the entire course. It is akin to a crash course that saves you both time and effort.

Zabbix Upgrade Training Program Overview

The Upgrade Training Program consists of two courses: Zabbix 6.0 Certified Specialist Upgrade Course and Zabbix 6.0 Certified Professional Upgrade Course. Let us tell you more about each upgraded training.

The Certified Specialist Upgrade Course covers the updated and new features of the basics, such as different data collection approaches, problem detection, data preprocessing, different visualization features, and more. Some of the long-awaited features you will get familiar with during the upgrade course are new Dashboard Widgets (e.g.: Item Value Widget), Top Hosts Widget, and the ability to display your monitored infrastructure on the Geomap Widget. Another thing that might serve your interest is the Service Monitoring section, which has been completely redesigned with a focus on flexible business service monitoring, alerting, and root cause analysis.

On the contrary, Certified Professional Upgrade Course focuses on advanced environments, where infrastructure scalability and redundancy are the common requirements. Hence, this course includes six major features, with two of them being High Availability and Advanced Problem Detection. The Zabbix server High Availability feature allows you to deploy multiple Zabbix servers that will remain in standby mode and will be failed over if the currently active server becomes unavailable. The Advanced Problem Detection section focuses on anomaly detection and baseline monitoring features, as Zabbix now supports history functions. This means that Zabbix can semi-automatically detect anomalous values and create alerts if such values are detected. The same approach can be used in baseline monitoring: Zabbix can now calculate baseline values for your metrics and react if your values are outside of this baseline.

As you see, such extensive training wraps up all the meaningful recent improvements of Zabbix 6.0 and delivers them to you in one day, not requiring you to spend a week on the course retake. And besides, it is also cheaper than the entire course.

This is the first time Zabbix is providing a quick and easy way to upgrade existing Zabbix 5.0 Specialist and Zabbix 5.0 Professional certifications to Zabbix 6.0. The course is designed for experienced Zabbix administrators, who are working with Zabbix 5.0 on daily basis. The one-day course featuring all important changes and updates in the most recent Zabbix LTS version is a very cost and time-efficient option.
– Kaspars Mednis, Chief Trainer at Zabbix

Applying for the Right Course

Now it is time to pick the right Upgrade Course to apply for if you are ready to evolve your Zabbix skills. Here are a few hints on how to do it.

If you have already completed our core training and received the Zabbix 5.0 Certified Specialist Certificate, you should apply for the Zabbix 6.0 Certified Specialist Upgrade Course. This one-day course includes 5 hours of training and a one-hour exam that will challenge you to check your knowledge of the whole Zabbix 6.0 LTS version and its new features.

Therefore, if you were certified as a 5.0 Certified Professional, go for the Zabbix 6.0 Certified Specialist + Professional Upgrade Course bundle. This one includes both: Specialist and Professional courses and lasts a little longer. After completing the Specialist course, Professionals will have their additional 1.5-hour training and a 30-minute exam to master their knowledge.

Useful Things to Know

We suggest revising your knowledge of the Zabbix usage, as the exam of the Upgrade Training Program includes questions about both: the entire Zabbix 6.0 LTS release, as well as new features and improvements. Feel free to use your Zabbix 5.0 materials from the previous core training you have completed or explore Zabbix Documentation in case the materials are unavailable to you for some reason.

Please, bear in mind that 6.0 Certified Professional Upgrade training is meant only for the 5.0 Certified Professionals who have previously acquired the 6.0 Certified Specialist level.

The Upgrade Training Program is available online all over the world in different languages and for various time zones. And what’s more, upon successful course completion, you will receive an official Zabbix training certificate stating you have upgraded to the Zabbix 6.0 Certified Specialist or Professional.

Ready for takeoff? Then check out the full schedule and cost of the program on our Upgrade Courses page and pick your training. For even more details, please contact our Sales Team.

Discover more courses and make a solid investment into your Zabbix skills by applying to:
• Core Training Courses to become a professional or an expert
• Extra Courses to study in depth one specific monitoring topic
• Exams to prove your Zabbix knowledge

 

What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix the Storyteller

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-zabbix-the-storyteller/24629/

Can you create fairy tales with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a monitoring technical 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 this project.

We all know how Zabbix has a never-ending list of integrations for just about everything — need to integrate it with OpsGenie, PagerDuty, Teams, Slack, or something else? No problem, there’s probably a ready-made integration for that already.

But, based on questions I’ve received over the years at work, not everyone realizes how utterly powerful the alert message templating engine is for you to create custom messages with the help of built-in macros and of course the user macros you can define. The default Zabbix HTML e-mail message template is very compact in its format, and for me easy to read, but years ago someone at work told me that the alerts were not easy for him to follow.

What I did back then was that I created an alert template of my own, which tells about the events in a bit different format, here’s a short snippet from those alerts.

Fairy tale time!

Now that at home we have our almost-three-months-old-baby, I’m using her as the perfect excuse to make Zabbix alerts to be like fairy tales. You know the drill. Your kiddo wants to hear yet another story before he or she falls asleep, and you have already run out of fresh stories to read.

What if your Zabbix would generate fairy tales for you? Well, not really, but at least the following would make the stories a bit more amusing to you and very confusing to your kid.

Let’s first create a new media type via Zabbix Administration –> Media types. For this, I just cloned the default HTML e-mail media type and gave it a name.

And then, my fantastic story template looks like this:

Add the template to user media type

Next, to actually receive these alerts, you need to configure your user profile and in its media types add the new media type.

Using the template

Getting the new template into use is easy; just go to Zabbix Configuration –> Actions and create a new trigger action with whatever conditions you like.

And then on Operations tab make Zabbix send the alerts via your new fairy tale media type.

The alert e-mail

So this is how the e-mail looks like.

Now go and add some CSS, pictures, whatever you like to your stories. And, perhaps, unlike me, go and change the {ITEM.DESCRIPTION} macro to contain also some instructions what to do with the alert, like at our custom alerts at work I have a tendency to add some hints about how to resolve the issue.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and I would have many stories to tell you about all these years. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix the Storyteller appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

Celebrating the community: Selin

Post Syndicated from Rosa Brown original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-the-community-selin/

We are so excited to share another story from the community! Our series of community stories takes you across the world to hear from young people and educators who are engaging with creating digital technologies in their own personal ways. 

Selin and a robot she has built.
Selin and her robot guide dog IC4U.

In this story we introduce you to Selin, a digital maker from Istanbul, Turkey, who is passionate about robotics and AI. Watch the video to hear how Selin’s childhood pet inspired her to build tech projects that aim to help others live well.  

Meet Selin 

Selin (16) started her digital making journey because she wanted to solve a problem: after her family’s beloved dog Korsan passed away, she wanted to bring him back to life. Selin thought a robotic dog could be the answer, and so she started to design her project on paper. When she found out that learning to code would mean she could actually make a robotic dog, Selin began to teach herself about coding and digital making. Selin has since built seven robots, and her enthusiasm for creating digital technologies shows no sign of stopping.    

Selin is on one knee, next to her robot.
Selin and her robot guide dog IC4U.

One of Selin’s big motivations to explore digital making was having an event to work towards. When she discovered Coolest Projects, our global technology showcase for young people, Selin set herself the task of making a robot that she could present at the Coolest Projects event in 2018. 

When thinking about ideas for what to make for Coolest Projects, Selin remembered how it felt to lose her dog. She wondered what it must be like when a blind person’s guide dog passes away, as that person loses their friend as well as their support. So Selin decided to make a robotic guide dog called IC4U. She contacted several guide dog organisations to find out how guide dogs are trained and what they need to be able to do so she could replicate their behaviour in her robot. The robot is voice-controlled so that people with impaired sight can interact with it easily. 

Selin and the judges at Coolest Projects.
Selin at Coolest Projects International in 2018.

Selin and her parents travelled to Coolest Projects International in Dublin with Selin’s robotic guide dog, and Selin and IC4U became a judges’ favourite in the Hardware category. Selin enjoyed participating in Coolest Projects so much that she started designing her project for next year’s event straight away:    

“When I returned back I immediately started working for next year’s Coolest Projects.”  

Selin

Many of Selin’s tech projects share a theme: to help make the world a better place. For example, another robot made by Selin is the BB4All — a school assistant robot to tackle bullying. And last year, while she attended the Stanford AI4ALL summer camp, Selin worked with a group of young people to design a tech project to increase the speed and accuracy of lung cancer diagnoses.

Through her digital making projects, Selin wants to show how people can use robotics and AI technology to support people and their well-being. In 2021, Selin’s commitment to making these projects was recognised when she was awarded the Aspiring Teen Award by Women in Tech.           

Selin stands next to an photograph of herself. In the photograph she has a dog on one side and a robot dog on the other.

Listening to Selin, it is inspiring to hear how a person can use technology to express themselves as well as create projects that have the potential to do so much good. Selin acknowledges that sometimes the first steps can be the hardest, especially for girls  interested in tech: “I know it’s hard to start at first, but interests are gender-free.”

“Be curious and courageous, and never let setbacks stop you so you can actually accomplish your dream.”    

Selin

We have loved seeing all the wonderful projects that Selin has made in the years since she first designed a robot dog on paper. And it’s especially cool to see that Selin has also continued to work on her robot IC4U, the original project that led her to coding, Coolest Projects, and more. Selin’s robot has developed with its maker, and we can’t wait to see what they both go on to do next.

Help us celebrate Selin and inspire other young people to discover coding and digital making as a passion, by sharing her story on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

The post Celebrating the community: Selin appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

What’s Up, Home? – Backups Matter!

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-backups-matter/24566/

Can you monitor your backups with Zabbix? Of course, you can — and you should! 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 this project.

Some time ago, Zabbix blog had an excellent read about how to back up Zabbix. While I’m next time coming up with something Completely Else in this blog, this week I wanted to remind you about backups.

The topic came into my mind as my old trustworthy Apple Time Capsule from 2013 probably just said “No, I don’t want to do this job anymore”. It’s a good thing that I also regularly back up my Mac to an external USB drive which I only keep connected to the Mac during backups and then put it in a safe place, and that I also do backup to iCloud and one other cloud service. Update one hour after publishing this blog post: Apple Time Capsule came back to life! But, I shall not trust it anymore.

But, for backing up my Raspberry Pi 4 and its Zabbix, I do something different. Let’s move on to that, shall we?

My old and trustworthy friend

A long time ago (20 years ago long time), I used BackupPC at work. Back then I liked it a lot, as it uses proven, field-tested components (Apache, Perl, rsync), it’s fast, light and does its job with no questions asked.

Until lately I took my home Zabbix backups to an external USB drive connected to our home router by letting a cron job to dump the database with mysqldump and copying some custom script directories around. As this What’s up, home? thing is now world-famous and my home Zabbix has turned into an invisible family member, it was time to take backups a bit more seriously — I don’t want to lose my precious home Zabbix configuration.

So, I went to BackupPC’s site and was surprised that it’s still developed! Kind of the latest release is from 2020, and oh boy, it’s much more polished than it was 20 years ago.

Faster than I can say “BA-NA-NA”, I typed sudo apt install backuppc on my spare laptop, which nowadays runs Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

Meet BackupPC

Here it is! Thanks to rsync and symbolic links, this thing did deduplication long before it became trendy.

And it lets me go back in time via a nice web interface from which I can easily restore individual files, directories or just everything. On October 24th, I did some testing, so don’t scratch your head about that day in the screenshot.

Zabbix, meet BackupPC

At first, I tried to use a Zabbix community template for BackupPC. It worked — for the most part. Unfortunately, at least with a combination of Zabbix 6.2 running on Raspberry Pi 4 and BackupPC 4.4.0 running on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, the template was unable to fetch metrics, as Zabbix agent’s web.page.get was inserting some garbage between HTTP headers and the expected JSON content — I guess I did hit this issue.

To work around the problem, I just changed the templates master item type to be HTTP Agent instead of Zabbix agent web.page.get. The difference is that with the Zabbix agent-based solution, the agent can fetch the content locally from the BackupPC server so its web interface does not need to listen on anything else than localhost, and now I opened my BackupPC to listen on the network and did let my Zabbix server to fetch the JSON.

If you want to try out my (very) slightly modified template, it’s available on my GitHub.

After the initial hurdles, the rest was a snap. Not every metric is working for me, as I understood that for them to work, I would need to use the bleeding edge version of BackupPC, but for now, this is good enough. I can get all kinds of metrics about BackupPC, below is a custom dashboard I created for it.

… and even if my BackupPC is backing up my Zabbix perfectly now, it is not backing up itself as I did not yet configure it to do so, so here’s how BackupPC would complain about my Zabbix backups too, should they be failing for any reason.

Do not trust your backups

What’s worse than having no backups at all? Doing backups, but ONLY doing backups. Especially if you are just setting up the backup routine for something completely new, it’s very likely that you miss something during the first try.

Backups are not a fire-and-forget thing, you better monitor them and regularly test them, or otherwise, it’s guaranteed that Mr. Murphy will hit you with a clue stick sooner or later.

So, here’s my €0.02:

  • Take regular backups
  • Monitor them
  • Test your backups
  • Make sure you have more than one backup (my MacBook copies the Zabbix backup files from my Ubuntu daily, too, and from there my Zabbix backups are spread to everywhere my Mac backups are)

My future development in this area includes a script that would attempt to automatically restore the database and my scripts to a VM/container, install Zabbix and see if it works. If it would not, then my Zabbix would get alerted.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and during my long IT career have learned that you always have to have a guaranteed way to restore something. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Backups Matter! appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Measure Real-Time Power Consumption

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-measure-real-time-power-consumption/24479/

Can you monitor Finland’s total real-time power consumption 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 this project.

After my speech at the Zabbix Summit 2022, someone asked how deeply my wife is involved with this home monitoring project, and I responded back that she usually gives me ideas by accident. You know, she’s a funny and talkative person up to the point that I call her the comment track or the voice-over of my life, so even as a non-techie, she will for sure give me new ideas.

Well, this time she gave the idea for this post on purpose — now that winter and the dark days & nights are approaching fast, she asked if Zabbix could turn our decorative seasonal lights on and off based on the current electricity price.

Of course, it can! I am anyway already monitoring the current electricity price. But let’s take it further — using Zabbix, we can also check Finland’s current real-time power consumption. It would be kind NOT to turn on the lights even during the cheap hours if our power grid would be near its maximum limit.

Hello, Fingrid

Our electricity network Fingrid offers open data for all kinds of details about our power grid, one of them being the current electricity consumption. Using their services is free, all you need is to create an account to get an API key, so I tried if I can use the API with Zabbix. Well, Zabbix integration was easy, though, due to the time constraints set by our now-10-weeks-old-baby, this current version is a bit of a kludge and not yet finished. But hey, I have this blog to write!

So, after getting my API key, I created a new HTTP agent item to my Zabbix and did parse it with Zabbix JSONPath for the value.

No alt text provided for this image
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Why the regular expression? The value was not returned in pure numeric format, and I know it must be just my JSONPath expression that has something wrong, but to get this working today, I just brute-forced the extra characters away. I’ll fix that one day. Maybe. The most important for now is that this works; the values shown are in megawatts.

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What’s next?

Now that the groundwork has been done, albeit in an ugly way, in the near future (when we actually install the seasonal lights), I can start controlling them via smart power sockets and smart lights. Thanks to the total flexibility of Zabbix, I can then create triggers such as turn on seasonal lights if electricity cost is maximum of X EUR/kWh AND Finland’s power grid total consumption is not more than Y MWh AND time of day is something when we would be awake (we would turn the lights off during the graveyard hours in any case).

I have some additional research to do; I’m sure I can find out Finland’s total power grid capacity from somewhere, maybe even via Fingrid API (I first tried it about one hour ago). But, as this winter is going to be totally different than our usual winters, Zabbix can help you in this area, too.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and just like a small part of Forcepoint’s logo, I’m trying to be green as well. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Measure Real-Time Power Consumption appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – The Clock Is Ticking

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-the-clock-is-ticking/24209/

Can you use Zabbix as a countdown timer? Of course, you can! By day, I am a technical monitoring 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 this project.

Note: This post was written a week before the Zabbix Summit 2022 kick-off on October 7-8 in Riga, Latvia. However, the content of this blog post does not lose its value and can be used for many other purposes.

Zabbix Summit 2022 is almost here. Finally, we meet again in person after two years of virtual summits. And this year, I got to be a speaker. YAY!

But can you make Zabbix show you if it’s time for the Summit yet? Yes, easily! Just create a calculated item that calculates the epoch time difference between your desired time and current time, and that’s about it.

Get your epoch time easily

In my case, I consider my Zabbix Summit to be starting when I board the plane at Helsinki Airport.

To get the epoch time, or Unix timestamp, or time in seconds since January 1st, 1970 00:00:00, for my flight departure, I went to the Epoch Converter website and entered the details.

Create a calculated item

With that info, I then created a new calculated item on Zabbix.

In other words, get the time remaining in seconds before my flight takes off.

For my calculated item, I declared the units to be in seconds, after which Zabbix already shows the results in a more convenient days — hours — minutes format.

Apply some value mapping

To make this more interesting, let’s apply some value mapping!

Next, when I apply this value mapping on my previously created item, I can then move on and create a separate dashboard for my Zabbix Summit countdown needs.

Create a dashboard

I simply added a new Item value widget to my new dashboard, chose my time until the Zabbix Summit item, adjusted font size, and item positioning, and here it is in all its glory.

I could of course create alert triggers for this to get a notification when I need to go to the airport, but I guess that’s totally unnecessary. Can’t wait to meet y’all!

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and monitoring keeps my internal clock ticking. Hmm, that was a weird sentence. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – The Clock Is Ticking appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – BA-NA-NA!

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-ba-na-na-2/24126/

Can you monitor a banana 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 this project.

BA-NA-NA!

All was as usual at the recent Zabbix Summit 2022, until Steve Destivelle kept his speech. He asked the audience to say BA-NA-NA every now and then to, I don’t know, to keep them awake or entertain them, or both.

From that moment, the rest of the summit went all bananas. So, what’s a better way for me to contribute to this ba-na-na meme than to attempt to monitor a banana, as anyway I am now known for monitoring weird things? Here we go!

Apart from a monkey wrench and a gorilla leg for your camera to get perfectly steady photos or videos of your precious snacks, what do we need to monitor bananas with Zabbix? Not much:

  • Some Python (I guess snakes might like bananas, too)
  • OpenCV image recognition libraries (no, that’s not a tool to help you create resumes on LinkedIn, the CV stands for Computer Vision)
  • zabbix_sender command
  • Zabbix itself
Let’s get started!

This banana monitoring is just a simulation, so I downloaded a random picture of a vector graphics banana from our dear Internet. See, it’s beautiful!

Feed the snake

OK, I now have a nice picture of a banana, but how on earth would I monitor that with Zabbix? With OpenCV, that’s not too hard. No, I do not know anything about OpenCV, but with some lucky search engine hits and some copy-pasting, I managed to get my super intelligent image recognition script to work.

It’s tailored to check a pixel I know belongs to our banana and then check the hue value of that pixel. With hue, it’s easier and more reliable to check the actual color, no matter its brightness, or so I was told by the articles I found.

Anyway, here’s the script!

Really, most of this was just copy-paste, so I do not take any credit for this code. But, it seems to do its job, as this is what happens when I run the script from the command line.

Fantastic! Or maybe, to honor Steve, I should say This was I-ZI.

Configuring Zabbix

To send this data to Zabbix, I’m going to use the good old zabbix_sender command. For that to work, I needed to set up a new trapper-type item for Zabbix.

And, well… that’s it. Now if I run the following from the command line, it works:

Let’s check from Latest data, too:

But it needs a dashboard!

Now that it’s working, it definitely needs a dashboard. This is what I created for it with just an Item value and URL widgets.

Ain’t technology fantastic? Now if only Zabbix would have dynamic colors for the item value widget, but I guess they told us at the Summit that it’s coming.

Of course, like with most of my blog posts, this kind of monitoring could have some real-world use cases, too: make OpenCV check pictures, video streams, photos, whatever and if the color of something that should be the same all the time is not the same anymore, make Zabbix go bananas about it.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and writing these posts has never been tastier. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – BA-NA-NA! appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – BA-NA-NA!

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-ba-na-na/24107/

Can you monitor a banana 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 this project.

BA-NA-NA!

All was as usual at the recent Zabbix Summit 2022, until Steve Destivelle kept his speech. He asked the audience to say BA-NA-NA every now and then to, I don’t know, to keep them awake or entertain them, or both.

From that moment, the rest of the summit went all bananas. So, what’s a better way for me to contribute to this ba-na-na meme than to attempt to monitor a banana, as anyway I am now known for monitoring weird things? Here we go!

Apart from a monkey wrench and a gorilla leg for your camera to get perfectly steady photos or videos of your precious snacks, what do we need to monitor bananas with Zabbix? Not much:

  • Some Python (I guess snakes might like bananas, too)
  • OpenCV image recognition libraries (no, that’s not a tool to help you create resumes on LinkedIn, the CV stands for Computer Vision)
  • zabbix_sender command
  • Zabbix itself
Let’s get started!

This banana monitoring is just a simulation, so I downloaded a random picture of a vector graphics banana from our dear Internet. See, it’s beautiful!

Feed the snake

OK, I now have a nice picture of a banana, but how on earth would I monitor that with Zabbix? With OpenCV, that’s not too hard. No, I do not know anything about OpenCV, but with some lucky search engine hits and some copy-pasting, I managed to get my super intelligent image recognition script to work.

It’s tailored to check a pixel I know belongs to our banana and then check the hue value of that pixel. With hue, it’s easier and more reliable to check the actual color, no matter its brightness, or so I was told by the articles I found.

Anyway, here’s the script!

Really, most of this was just copy-paste, so I do not take any credit for this code. But, it seems to do its job, as this is what happens when I run the script from the command line.

Fantastic! Or maybe, to honor Steve, I should say This was I-ZI.

Configuring Zabbix

To send this data to Zabbix, I’m going to use the good old zabbix_sender command. For that to work, I needed to set up a new trapper-type item for Zabbix.

And, well… that’s it. Now if I run the following from the command line, it works:

Let’s check from Latest data, too:

But it needs a dashboard!

Now that it’s working, it definitely needs a dashboard. This is what I created for it with just an Item value and URL widgets.

Ain’t technology fantastic? Now if only Zabbix would have dynamic colors for the item value widget, but I guess they told us at the Summit that it’s coming.

Of course, like with most of my blog posts, this kind of monitoring could have some real-world use cases, too: make OpenCV check pictures, video streams, photos, whatever and if the color of something that should be the same all the time is not the same anymore, make Zabbix go bananas about it.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and writing these posts has never been tastier. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – BA-NA-NA! appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Staring at the Video Stream

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-staring-at-the-video-stream/23882/

Can you make sure your video streams are up with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana Labs and do some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my weekly blog about the project.

You might have a surveillance camera at home to record suspicious activities in your yard while you are away or so. Most of the time the cameras do work just fine but might require a hard reboot from time to time, for example, due to harsh weather, or not coming back after a network outage. A networked camera responding to ping does not 100% mean the camera is actually functional. I have seen our camera going black and refusing to connect to its stream even though it thinks it’s working just fine.

Zabbix to the rescue!

Connecting to your camera

My post for this week is mostly to maybe give you a new approach for monitoring your cameras, not so much a functional solution as I’m still figuring out how to do this properly.

For example, I can connect to our camera via RTSP protocol and pass some credentials with it, so rtsp://myusername:[email protected]:443/myAddress

To figure out a connection address for your camera model, iSpyConnect has a nice camera database.

Playing the stream

To test if the video stream works, VLC and mplayer are good options; for visually verifying the stream works, try something like

mplayer ‘rtsp://myusername:[email protected]:443/myAddress’

or for those who like to use a GUI, in VLC, File –> Open Network –> enter your camera address.

For obvious reasons, I am not posting here an image from our camera. Anyway, trust me, this method should work if you have a compatible camera.

Let’s go next for the neat tricks part, which I’m still figuring out myself, too.

Making sure the stream works

To make sure the video stream is up and running, make your Zabbix server, Zabbix proxy, or a dedicated media server to continuously stream your video feed. For example:

mplayer -vo null ‘rtsp://myusername:[email protected]:443/myAddress’

The combination above would make mplayer play the stream with a null video driver; thus, the stream will be continuously played, but just with no visual video output generated. In other words, under perfect conditions, the mplayer process should be running on the server all the time. If anything goes wrong with the stream, mplayer quits itself, and the process goes away from the process list, too.

Using Zabbix to check the player status

Now that you have some server continuously playing the stream, it’s time to check the status with Zabbix.

From here, checking the stream status with Zabbix is simple, just

  • create a new item to check if for example mplayer process is around with Zabbix Agent item type and proc.num[,mplayer] key and
  • make your Zabbix alert about it if the number of mplayer processes is <1
Camera screenshots to your Zabbix user interface

Both mplayer and VLC can be controlled remotely, so here’s an idea I have not yet implemented but testing out.

If a motion sensor, either an external unit or a built-in, detects movement, make Zabbix send a command to the camera to record a screenshot of the camera stream, or possibly a short video. Then just make the script to save the photo or video in a directory that Zabbix can access and then show with its URL widget type.

mplayer has a slave mode for receiving commands from external programs, which might work together with a FIFO pipe.

Real-time video stream in your Zabbix user interface

At least VLC can transcode RTSP to HTTP stream in real-time, so in theory, then embedding the resulting stream to your Zabbix user interface should very much be doable with a short HTML file and Zabbix URL widget type. This one I did not yet even start to try out, though.

So, that’s all for this week’s blog post. I’m still building this thing out, but if you have successfully done something similar, please let me know!

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and am a true fan of functional testing. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Staring at the Video Stream appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – How Zabbix Can Help You with Rising Electricity Bills

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-how-zabbix-can-help-you-with-rising-electricity-bills/23582/

Can you monitor your upcoming electricity bills with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana Labs and make some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my weekly blog about the project.

With the current world events, energy prices are soaring. But how much do I need to really pay next month for my electricity? Zabbix to the rescue!

(Yes, in Finland I can check that from my electricity company’s page, but where’s the fun in that?)

Fixed vs spot price

There are two kinds of electricity contracts you can subscribe to in Finland. With a fixed price, you can be sure your bill does not fluctuate that much from month to month, as you pay the same price per kilowatt for every hour of the day. In this kind of deal, the electricity company adds some extra to each kilowatt, so you will automatically pay some extra compared to the electricity market price, but at least you don’t get so severely surprised by market price peaks.

Then there’s the spot price, where you pay only the electricity market price. This can and will vary a lot depending on the hour of the day, but at least in theory, this is the cheapest option in the long run. But, if the market price goes WAY up, like it tends to do in the winter, and has now been peaking due to world events, this can add to your bill.

Nordpool, please respond

There’s Nord Pool (“Nord Pool runs the leading power market in Europe, offering day-ahead and intraday markets to our customers”), and there’s a Python library for accessing Nord Pool electricity prices. With it, I could get hour-by-hour prices, but for this experiment, let’s stick with the average kWh price. The example script on the GitHub page shows all kinds of data, and for fun let’s use Zabbix item preprocessing to parse the average price from its output.

I now have the below script on running as a cron task every night, so my results will be updated once per 24 hours.

So, Zabbix then reads the file contents, like in so many of my previous blog posts.

Next, let’s add some preprocessing. The regular expression part gets the Average value from the script output, and the custom multiplier changes the value from “Euros per Megawatt” to “Euros per Kilowatt”, for it to be a familiar value for me from the electricity bills.

And… it’s working! As I know our average consumption, let’s add a new Grafana dashboard.

Four seasons

During summer, we don’t actually use very much electricity compared to our harsh winter; for example, keeping our garage “warm” (about +10C) during winter contributes to our electricity bill quite a lot.
Here’s a dashboard showing some guesstimations of how expensive the different seasons will be for us. Or, hopefully cheap, if the long overdue new Olkiluoto 3 nuclear plant finally could operate at its full capacity here in Finland.

The guesstimate above is missing some taxes and electricity transfer prices, so the reality will be a bit more expensive than this. Maybe I should also add some triggers to Zabbix to make me alert about any really crazy price changes.

Anyway, now I can start gathering nuts for the cold winter as it seems that it will be an expensive one.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and I’m happy that my laptop does not consume too much electricity. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – How Zabbix Can Help You with Rising Electricity Bills appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Automatic Temperature Control

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-automatic-temperature-control/23401/

Can you automatically control the temperature of your home in a time- and room-based manner using Zabbix? Of course, you can!

By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and make some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my weekly blog about this project.

Earlier in this blog series, I made Zabbix read the status of our air conditioner, and made it possible to use Zabbix as manual remote control for the device. But we need to take a step further and make Zabbix control the AC based on the time of day and if I am at home or not.

Forget the sweaty nights

Usually in Finland during the summer, the nights are not so hot that an AC would be needed. However, that can happen during any rare heat wave we get. It’s annoying to wake up in the middle of the night all sweaty and turn on the AC when it’s already too late.

Of course, I could just leave the AC on when I go to bed, but let’s make Zabbix do some good for our electricity bill and for the environment by not using the AC when it’s not needed.

Detecting if I am at home

Like so many times before in this blog series, Cozify smart home hub is the true star of this story. It detects if anyone is at home based on if a specific phone or, for example, a smart key fob is present and reachable in Cozify’s range. For this case, I will be using my smart key fob in Zabbix, too. This is how it looks in Cozify.

… and here’s the key fob reachability status in Zabbix.

Surprisingly enough, it shows 1 (or “True”) as my status now that I type this blog entry at home and my keys are at home.

A deeper dive into my key fob Zabbix item

To make this all work, I have a set of Python scripts gathering data from Cozify via an unofficial Cozify API Python library. One of the scripts gets the reachability status for all the items, and here’s the configuration for my key fob Zabbix item.

… and some preprocessing …

Let’s add some triggers

Now that we have the key fob data, let’s create some triggers to combine the data about my presence with the temperature information.

I created the triggers by using Zabbix expression constructor:

.. and when I was done, this is how it looked.

I made a similar trigger for our living room, too.

Next, some scripts

Next I added some scripts under Zabbix Administration → Scripts and made them as Action operations.

This one turns on the AC:

… and this one turns it off.

Lights, camera, action!

We have our triggers and scripts, great! Next, it’s time to add some actions.

  • During the daytime, Zabbix will be interested in the living room temperature and will turn on AC if the temperature goes over 23C for ten consecutive times
  • During the nighttime, Zabbix will be reading the temperature of our bedroom and turn on AC if the temperature goes over 23C for ten consecutive times

We will see how well my attempt at this will work. Here’s what the operations look like — if it’s too hot, turn on the AC, and when the temperature comes down enough, turn off the AC.

As I built this thing while I was writing this blog entry, it’s possible I would need to fine-tune the thresholds somewhat to not make my automatic AC control too aggressive. Anyway, this now works in theory.

Oh, BTW, Cozify could also make similar rules, but as it does not directly support our air conditioner (but would require a separate Air Patrol device for that), this is again a great example of how I can utilize Cozify, but with Zabbix extend my home’s IoT functionality even more for free.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and always try to find out new ways to automate things. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Automatic Temperature Control appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix the Climate Remote

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-zabbix-the-climate-remote/23207/

Can you control your air conditioner using Zabbix? Of course, you can!

By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix and Grafana and do some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my weekly blog about this project.

A few months ago I added our recently bought air conditioner to Zabbix monitoring by utilizing MQTT. Reading values is nice and mandatory for monitoring; but can we also send commands to the air conditioner using Zabbix? Yes.

Testing, testing

MQTT is a little unknown area for me, so please don’t hit me too hard if I’m doing this completely wrong. Anyway, this seems to work! I know that Zabbix supports MQTT for reading data, but I’m not sure if it can do writing, so that’s why I am using a command line and external scripts for my example.

At first, I tested if my whole idea would work just by using the command line:

The mosquitto_pub command might sound like a bar where some summer-time insects spend their free time, but no, this one instead publishes an MQTT message with value 22 to that aircon topic. In other words, I tried to change the temperature to 22 degrees Celsius.

And it worked!

From here, the rest was easy. I created three shell one-liners:

  • One for setting AC mode (off, cooling, etc.)
  • One for setting AC fan speed
  • One for setting AC temperature

These then receive some value from Zabbix by taking the command line argument. Yeah, I know, I didn’t add any input validation here.

Adding it to Zabbix

Now that I have my scripts, I then went to Zabbix Administration –> Scripts and added some scripts there.

I gave these scripts a menu tree structure, so from now on I can control my AC from Zabbix and it looks like this.

Setting fan speed:

Setting AC mode:

Setting temperature:

… and whenever I execute any of these, I get mosquitto_pub command output back, here setting the temperature to 22 C.

Of course, the scripts could be hooked with triggers, so if for example, our living room would be too hot, Zabbix could power on the AC automatically. For now, I’m not taking the automatic route as we might not be at home all the time.

A Grafana dashboard

And, like for so many other monitored items, I also have a separate Grafana dashboard for our air conditioning, with values being read from Zabbix. From the dashboard, I can easily see whenever our AC has been on or off, what’s the fan speed and so on.

And btw, those of you using Zabbix 6.2 and Grafana — please make sure you upgrade your Grafana Zabbix plugin to at least version 4.2.9 (released on July 12th, 2022), as the previous versions did not work with Zabbix 6.2 at all. I found this out the hard way at home, but I patiently waited for the update.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and it never has been cooler to work from home. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Zabbix the Climate Remote appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Syslog, Hold the Line

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-syslog-hold-the-line/23071/

Can you find out what your laptop is doing during its boot with Zabbix? Of course, you can!

By day, I am a monitoring technical 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 weekly blog about this project.

This time I was originally planning to write about how to monitor yet another device with Zabbix, but as in today’s world deliveries seem to take a long time, I’ll blog about something else — Zabbix and syslog collection.

Zabbix as syslog platform?

You might not think of Zabbix as of a syslog platform, as there are specialized tools for that, providing much more functionality for log management than Zabbix ever could. However, sending syslog information to Zabbix can be very useful. In bigger environments, sending everything to it might be overkill and too taxing, so please, filter with care and consider the log retention period, but at home with a very low logging rate, this can be handy.

Logs? How and why?

At my home network, a Raspberry Pi 4 is running a Zabbix server, among other software. One of the roles of my cool little Raspberry is that it acts as a centralized syslog server. I have configured my home router, MacBook, and one more laptop to send their syslog to rsyslogd running on my Raspberry.

Then, on Zabbix, I have an item configured to keep an eye on the centralized log file the events are flowing into.

This way, I can see all kinds of events happening on those devices via Zabbix, and create appropriate triggers if something worth mentioning gets logged. Inspecting the syslog with the Zabbix Plain text widget, it’s shown absolutely everything, and well, that view probably contains just noise.

Adding details

However, if you start searching for whatever you would need to know about, then you of course can search for content. Let’s see what my MacBook has automatically updated lately:

I can then add a trigger that would log the time when something got installed or updated. It’s in no way a replacement for a proper log management solution, but for Super Important Targets something like this could be very useful, as you could catch any looming issues via Zabbix immediately, too.

Likewise, I can see what my Linux laptop has been doing:

In my configuration, absolutely everything gets sent to Zabbix, so the syslog entries from the devices are coming in starting from the moment the devices have their network & syslog services up, and they will stop coming when the syslog service stops during a shutdown.

Here’s the Linux laptop starting up:

MacBook also sends its events to syslog during OS updates/startup/shutdown, but it’s been so long since I last restarted my Mac that my Zabbix does not have the logs for that period of time anymore, and I don’t want to restart my MacBook (which I’m using to type this blog entry) just to get a screenshot from its boot sequence.

Hopefully, my new gadget will arrive soon, so I can then finally blog about that. 🙂

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and in addition to monitoring addict, I am a log addict, too. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

The post What’s Up, Home? – Syslog, Hold the Line appeared first on Zabbix Blog.

What’s Up, Home? – Record Your Roomba Dance

Post Syndicated from Janne Pikkarainen original https://blog.zabbix.com/whats-up-home-record-your-roomba-dance/22943/

Can you monitor your several-year-old dumb Roomba iRobot vacuum cleaner with Zabbix? Of course, you can!

By day, I am a monitoring technical lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and make weird experiments with them. Welcome to my weekly blog about this project.

This post is a tad bit shorter than usual, as my summer vacation was looming and I had much other fish to fry before that. However, my motivation for this post came from guests visiting us at our home that weekend, so doing the hoovering and stuff was a reasonable thing to do.

Monitor your robot vacuum cleaner with Zabbix

So, I just did put our Roomba to do some initial cleaning. While doing so, I attached the RuuviTag I used in my last post to our Roomba, and of course, did so by using the gorgeously ugly brown tape to secure Ruuvi’s trip.

As RuuviTag has acceleration sensors, it may be possible to record Roomba’s movements by using Ruuvi. Does it work? Of course, it does.

See, it works!

This is so far my most rushed blog entry, as I literally started this experiment in about 30 minutes. The RuuviTag was already configured to my Zabbix, as it’s the same one that is/was measuring if our dog Lily is in her bed.

However, Lily’s presence was detected by utilizing Ruuvi’s temperature sensor. This Roomba experiment is done by checking the readings from RuuviTag acceleration sensors. See, it works!

From the graph we can clearly see 1) the moment I did transfer RuuviTag from Lily’s bed to Roomba and 2) Roomba’s movement.

So, from these graphs, I can then see for how long Roomba was doing its stuff.

But why?

OK, this is a stupid example, but in the real world, there would be more practical applications for this kind of monitoring. For example, monitor something that should NOT be moving (maybe a grill in your backyard or a safe at work), and if it starts moving, immediately suspect that something is wrong. Or, monitor something that should be in the constant move (conveyor belt?) but is not, and alert accordingly.

I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and adding more data points to monitoring is still fascinating. — Janne Pikkarainen

This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.

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