whatsuphome

As Zabbix 7.0 will come with the new widget framework, allowing communication between different widgets on dashboards, of course I had to try it out. 

Creating the module

The blog post title is a bit of a clickbait in a sense that this example is just 1:1 from Zabbix Summit 2023 custom widgets workshop session. I made some very, very minor modifications to code, mainly just changed my name and so on to manifest.json files. Since the code itself was obtained from the workshop session, I'm not going to publish it, but this much I will tease:

Since I will have some real use for Zabbix 7.0 when it comes out, I figured out that maybe it's time to switch my What's up, home? main instance to run on Zabbix 7.0beta1. Actually, I first upgraded to Zabbix 7.0alpha9 early yesterday, but then 7.0beta1 got released later in the evening before I had time to play around with alpha9. 

Anyway, now my Raspberry Pi 4 is running the latest-and-greatest version of Zabbix. A possible bumpy ride ahead, but I'm ready!

Can you control your lights with Zabbix? Of course you can!

As I told during my Zabbix Summit 2023 speech, there will be a blog series about how I control my home with Zabbix. Let's start with how I control my home office lights -- or any light connected to our Cozify -- with it.

First of all, in Cozify I have the office light (Philips Hue) like this.

In December, my wife told my how she's annoyed about one Finnish company which tends to change its product prices out of nowhere all the time. To visualize this, of course I added a random product from that company's website to my dear What's up, home? monitoring.

The products in question are not complex to manufacture, and are not dependent on terribly fluctuating things like chip availability, oil prices or similar factors. Anyway, the price randomness is very real - the price varies between 23.90 EUR and 59.90 EUR.

This is the difference in I/O wait times after I replaced the faulty Raspberry Pi memory card to brand new one.

So, from about 8-9 seconds AVERAGES to back almost non-existent! Yay!

Now almost a year ago I blogged about my nine months of experience with running Zabbix on Raspberry Pi 4. I guess it's time to revisit that a bit, as the probably soon-to-fail memory card that came with Raspberry is causing all kinds of issues, even though everything important like Zabbix database is stored on external USB drive.

The filesystem layout

My Raspberry Pi is still booting from the memory card that came with it. However, I have moved much of the stuff to external USB drive I have connected to Raspberry:

Can you monitor your MacBook behaviour with Zabbix? Of course you can!

My personal Mac is old. It's way too old, actually. It's a MacBook Pro Retina mid-2012 -- yes, I bought it back in August 2012. It has served me well, even so well that with OpenCore Legacy Patcher it has been if not snappy, but fast enough to use for my blogging purposes and so forth. The laptop was running macOS Ventura until few days back, but then I made a mistake -- a big mistake -- as I upgraded it to latest macOS Sonoma.

AIEEEE!!! Potential hiccups ahead for my master server, as today I started to observe these in dmesg output after rebooted my Raspberry Pi.

Just.a quick note: as the Drupal version (9.x) this site was running on is not supported anymore, I migrated the site to Drupal 10.x. As the theme I was using with Drupal 9.x is not compatible with 10.x, the site is for now using the Drupal 10 default theme. That actually looks quite OK, so I'll get back to theming whenever I have time.

Can you monitor NixOS with Zabbix? Of course you can! And that's why I've been silent lately.

Well the bold text is pretty much unnecassary. NixOS is at least semi-supported for Zabbix. I would not set my primary server with NixOS, not with its current state, but for everything else, it's awesome and different.