We are proud to announce that icinga.com is now also hosting integrations of hardware for monitoring environmental sensors and alerting via text message. The devices from the manufacturers listed on Icinga Integrations can easily be implemented into your Icinga monitoring by using plugins provided on Icinga Exchange.
Alerts via Text Message
Basically, there are two types of devices, which are most suitable for integration with Icinga. First group of them are gateways for sending SMS as alert messages. These gateways work with standard SIM cards and can run on bands in 4G, 3G and 2G networks. These devices also provide more functionality than only sending messages, they are also capable of converting SMS to E-Mail or the other way round or using filters and routing for sending messages only to a certain person or group of persons (phonebook listing). Furthermore, the gateways have their own monitoring server which means that they can automatically send notifications for example in case of loosing connection to the network.
In order to smoothly add these gateways into one’s productive processes, there exist for example plugins for directly connecting to your Microsoft Exchange for full usage of E-Mail to SMS conversion. Integrated with Icinga 2 you cannot only monitor the device itself but also use it in order to forward notifications generated by Icinga. The two main manufacturers of these gateways are Braintower located in Germany and SMSEagle with their headquarters in Poland.
Environmental Monitoring
Second type of integratable devices are mainly meant for measuring and surveillance. These consist most of the time of a base unit and several ports for connecting sensors. The base units can either directly communicate via LAN or via GSM in case of remote locations. For full environmental monitoring, there are plenty of sensor types that can be attached:
- temperature
- humidity
- combination of temperature and humidity
- air pressure
- air flow
- voltage
- water and leakage
- smoke and Gas
- levels of liquids like pertrol
- movement, vibration and opening of doors
The main manufacturers for measuring devices are currently AKCP, GUDE, HW group and Tinkerforge. For all these you can find monitoring plugins on Icinga Exchange. The manufacturer GUDE also offers power supplies that cannot only monitor voltage, but are also capable of remote controlling plugs and devices.
Integrating Tinkerforge with Icinga
In order to have a closer look at how these devices can be integrated with Icinga 2, Tinkerforge is one of the best examples. The whole plugin project can be found at https://exchange.icinga.com/netways/check_tinkerforge and shows not only the integration but also offers an insight into the functionalities of the device.
For using the check_tinkerforge plugin it is required to run Python 2.7+ and to have the tinkerforge Python library from Pypi installed. After this, installation is done with pip install tinkerforge and moving the plugin into the Icinga PluginDir location.
Now let’s have a look at the options of the plugin:
$ ./check_tinkerforge.py --help usage: check_tinkerforge.py [-h] [-V] [-v] -H HOST [-P PORT] [-S SECRET] [-u UID] -T TYPE [-w WARNING] [-c CRITICAL] [-t TIMEOUT] optional arguments: -h, --help show this help message and exit -V, --version show program's version number and exit -v, --verbose -H HOST, --host HOST The host address of the Tinkerforge device -P PORT, --port PORT Port (default=4223) -S SECRET, --secret SECRET Authentication secret -u UID, --uid UID UID from Bricklet -T TYPE, --type TYPE Bricklet type. Supported: 'temperature', 'humidity', 'ambient_light', 'ptc' -w WARNING, --warning WARNING Warning threshold. Single value or range, e.g. '20:50'. -c CRITICAL, --critical CRITICAL Critical threshold. Single vluae or range, e.g. '25:45'. -t TIMEOUT, --timeout TIMEOUT Timeout in seconds
As the TinkerForge device supports sensors like temperature or humidity as well as other types, we need to indicate what sensor should be checked by using the -T or --type operator:
check_tinkerforge.py -H 10.0.10.163 -T temperature -w 23 WARNING - Tinkerforge: Temperature is 24.75 degrees celcius|'temperature'=24.75
In case you have more multiple sensors of one type, you are required to indicate the UID with the -u or --uid operator in order to correctly identify the sensor in question. Furthermore, thresholds can either be indicated as single values or value ranges and by using the usual operators for warning and critical.
For integration of the sensors into your Icinga 2 configuration, you need to create a CheckCommand object like for other check plugins. The device itself will be created as Host object and all sensors should be covered with an apply Service. For your comfort you can find an example config for TinkerForge here. This example can directly be used, it is only necessary to change the parameters and in case you have multiple sensors of one type, to add the UIDs.
All manufacturers mentioned in this blog post can be found on the Icinga integrations website including information on the companies, the devices and the links to the corresponding monitoring plugins.
