I had an Asuswrt-Merlin based home router for many years. However, my trusty ASUS RT-AX68U started to misbehave badly -- most of the CPU time spent on I/O wait for no clear reason, dropping especially 2.4 GHz connections and more.
I then stumbled upon a very affordable ASUS RT-AX59U.Not the latest and greatest, but it had something I wanted: good support for OpenWrt. It was time for me to try out something else than Asuswrt-Merlin just to be different.
What's OpenWrt?
OpenWrt is a custom firmware for all kinds of routers, having way more features than a usual stock firmware on any home router. As a bonus, OpenWrt gets security updates, bug fixes and new features much faster than a usual stock firmware. Getting it up and running is the easy part, but it allows such amount of customization -- and more through 27,000 installable packages -- that it is easy to get lost into its jungle. :D
Software collection
Speaking of software, of course one of the first things I checked if I can monitor OpenWrt over Zabbix agent or do I need to use SNMP for it. I was pleasantly surprised to see this. Well, Asuswrt-Merlin's Entware uses opkg underneath and it had Zabbix agent too, so I was not too surprised. Nevertheless, always great to see the agent to be available on more exotic places.
Installing Zabbix agent
As you can see from the image, installation itself is super easy, just click and you are done (or go to shell and do opkg install zabbix-agentd).
That zabbix-extra-wifi package got me curious. What might it do?
Zabbix-extra-wifi package
So I installed the extra package too. Here's what my Zabbix now shows about the wifi:
That's some good number of useful wifi metrics! Next I need to port my per-device statistics from Asuswrt-Merlin to OpenWrt, but that can wait for another day.
Of course, as my OpenWrt is now monitored through Zabbix agent, all the usual metrics are automatically being collected too.
Off I go, I have some VLANs to setup and other remaining tasks to do.
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