Monitoring devices

[michael]

I am sure that this not only of interest to me: Since our museum is operated by volunteers (elderly people) most of the time, who cannot be asked to go to InfoBeamer Website and check the devices whether they are all marked green. I have been checking this on a daily basis even during vacation using my smart phone. I could think of a better method, where this is a push process, sending an SMS message to a group of people when there is a fault condition. Any thoughts, suggestions on this?

[infobeamer-fw]

(I’ve moved the question into its own topic)

info-beamer doesn’t have it’s own monitoring or notification system (yet?), but offers a way to integrate with other systems. Have a look at Managing large number of devices / Monitoring which describes the usage of the device checks API call.

[johnniewalker.email]

Michael, I have just started using Uptime Robot to monitor large numbers of devices, see here:

Managing large number of devices / Monitoring

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 user…

It’s actually really easy ( and free ) to setup and just uses the devices url to monitor if it goes offline.

A notification email is then sent to whoever you setup in your Uptime Robot dashboard.

I know this won’t give detailed information, and is just for detecting if the device is offline, but really the devices should be given good internet connectivity anyway.

[michael]

Hi Johnnie, thanks for sharing your experience. In our case there is mainly of interest whether devices are up or offline, so that solution would be fine. As soon as I have completed my current tasks, I will definitely try it out. We have excellent internet connectivity, even we are operating in a tunnel quite some distance from the main building. We have used fibre from the building to the tunnel and about 400 metres of CAT6 inside the tunnel and lots of switches routing and restoring the LAN signals.

[johnniewalker.email]

That’s a lot of cable!

We have used the Mifi adapters for a couple of installs, but obviously that’s an additional monthly cost for a data sim.
I found that it was possible to power the Mifi wifi adapter from the micro OTG USB port on the Pi Zero, which at least made it a bit easier to setup.

As long as the Mifi adapter is ready for the Pi to connect to when the power is cycled then it works fine, and many of the Mifi adapters have a battery inside, almost like a mini UPS

[michael]

The tunnel is about 160 metres long and full of aluminum walls, with lots of reflections and hard to predict signal quality. That is the main reason for going the hard route and wiring cable. Also the Pis reside within the walls almost completely shielded, so we would have to route antennas for the WLAN outside the display walls in a manner so that they cannot be seen by visitors, but still make good signal quality. We had a few minor problems with LAN connectors, which we solved. The climate in the tunnel is not what you would like to have for electronics! It can become quite wet in summer when warm moisty air flows through and condenses on the cold walls. Also water drips from the ceiling. I am sure that this is one of the more complicated setups for InfoBeamer in terms of environment that is out there.