I’m wondering if the new permissions system/sub accounts would be helpful for maintaining a large number of devices.
This could be as many as 300 devices, some of which will be grouped into a few devices per location.
Having all devices named appropriately will help, and checking for any offline devices is also easy if they are all on a single page, as it’s just a case of looking for a device that is ‘pink’, but just wondering if there’s any way of making the process easier.
Do any other users have large numbers of devices that they need to manage?
So you want to monitor them and be alerted if they go offline? There are users that integrate info-beamer into their existing monitoring system like nagios by calling the API and evaluating the state of the system against the expected state.
I feel that adding a generic monitoring and notification system into info-beamer might be a quite complex before it becomes useful: Users might want to monitor different conditions and be alerted in various ways. I’d rather make the API flexible enough so you can integrate with various existing systems. One idea might be a new API call that allows you to set a few conditions (all devices, devices with a location name starting with xxx, offline for more than 10 minutes, etc.) and the API would return an error if that condition isn’t met. You could then use the permission system to automate that call using one of the many status monitoring services like uptimerobot (which info-beamer itself uses for monitoring). Once the API call returns an error, you’d get a notification by email/app/sms/chat message.
Feedback welcome.
Yes, integration with uptime robot would be great, as this would automate the monitoring to check that devices are online.
In the device list page, would there be a way to add ‘grouping’ or list alphabetically, as in some locations we may need several devices, and it would be nice to be able to have the devices listed alphabetically by device name, so it’s easier to find the required device in a list that could contain 300 devices.
If there was a ‘folder view’ type option where devices could be grouped inside folders that might also be handy, especially if there was a toggle button to expand all folders to make it quicker to see any devices that are ‘pink’ ( offline ) at a glance.
Right now the list is sorted by location. If you use something like City/Location/Floor or similar, they will be sorted in a way that might make things easier. But right now that’s all pretty rigid. There will be a new device list view eventually. It’s definitely something that has to be improved when handling a large number of devices in a single account. Stay tuned 
Have a look at https://info-beamer.com/doc/api#checks
Essentially you a url like the following to your monitoring system (be sure to read the warning below):
https://info-beamer.com/api/v1/check/devices?filter:location=Office/*&check:offline=600&api-key=XXX
In this example it matches all device with a location like Office/*. Then for these devices it checks to see if any of them have been offline for 10 minutes (600 seconds). If so, the returned HTTP status code is 503 instead of 200 and your monitoring system will probably notify you.
You can also filter on device description or check for maintenance issues, so you’ll be notified if (for example) a device starts rebooting for some reason.
The above XXX has to be replaced with an API key. Warning: Never use an API key with full access to your account for that! Instead create a new self-access, select the Monitoring access ACL and use its API key.
This API call should be considered experimental for now and might get changed in the future. Feedback welcome.
Hi Florian, I’m about to start testing this with Uptime Robot.
I’ve created a new ACL access account for this, just one question, does this mean that my device location descriptions cannot have spaces, and use hyphens instead eg:
Office-room-1
Office-room-2
Or if they do have spaces do I need to enter %20 in place of the space?
Thanks
Use proper URL encoding for all parameters, then your device names can be (almost) whatever you want. I guess it’s best to use some library to generate the final url, but if you want to do it by hand, %20 represents the space character.
Is it possible to filter on a device specific level? by serial number for example within the api call?
Not at the moment. Right now you’re limited to location/description. But this can be added.
When could this be added, as this feature would be essential. Could this be done today?
No. But you can add a unique suffix to a device’s name and use the existing description filter.
New filters for the check API call are now possible:
- filter:id, for checking only a single device id
- filter:serial, for checking devices with that serial. Usually that would be only a single device, but in theory you could have multiple devices listed with the same serial, if you (for some reason) have multiple SD cards and swap between them.
See here for the updated documentation.
Hello, I am asking if anyone can share some tips or give some directiosn regarding adding RPI with InfoBeamer to a Nagios server or something similar.
This is needed just to inform if a device is down and nor delivering content.
Thank you in advance.
Anyone?
You’re already in the correct forum post for that. Did you look into the check API call documentation to see how it works? The goal for the check API is to be queried by something like nagios.