Hi friends!
It's been a while (real-life, work, and stuff), but today I have a new program to show. I've been playing around with my Digital Devices Octopus NET, and found that it does have some nice party tricks up its sleeve.
For example, it can be made to give values like SNR and Signal strength by sending a specific HTTP request to it.
Once I had that figured out, I wanted to do something fun with this knowledge. One of my other hobbies is homelabbing - so why not bring both together?
Those of us who have dipped their toes in homelabbing, smart-home, or enterprise-grade IT might have already heard of Prometheus and Grafana. These are two open-source tools that are commonly used together to monitor and visualize metrics from various sources. Prometheus is a time-series database that collects and stores metrics from different sources, while Grafana is a visualization tool that allows users to create dashboards and visualizations based on the data collected by Prometheus.
And now using my octonet-exporter program, we can make Prometheus collect metrics from an Octopus NET device and visualize them in Grafana.
For those of us who run Prometheus and Grafana, this gives us a convenient way to long-term monitor and visualize reception quality of frequencies an Octopus NET is tuned to.
As this program is designed to run in the background and will, due to its nature, take a fair bit of time to show what it can do, I don't have a showcase video this time.
But I do have a screenshot of a Grafana dashboard that shows an example of metrics collected by the octonet-exporter program:
In this example screenshot, I had my Octopus NET's Tuner 1 on 19,2°E/12460/H (green line) and Tuner 2 on 19,2°E/11604/V (yellow line). One can clearly see that the weather at my home wasn't very good on the 20.9. around 09:00-12:00. 😁
This program is more a proof-of-concept than a finished project, so there's something I'd like to ask you:
- Is there a demand for a tool like this? I do realize that not many do own an Octopus NET device. But would a tool like this for TBS cards be interesing? StreamReader.dll's API provides methods to developers to read things SNR/BER, among some other things. That would make writing an exporter easy. So I wonder whether a streamreader-exporter (or tbs-exporter? 🤔) would be useful.
- How interesting are long-term monitoring tools like these in general to the community?
- Of course I also understand that not many users do run Prometheus/Grafana, given that these are rather niche tools. If my octonet-exporter (or other future exporters) seem interesting enough, would you be interested in a detailed guide in setting Prometheus, Grafana and *-exporter up?
Long story short, here's the download link to octonet-exporter, including both a compiled binary and the source code: https://mega.nz/file/I1sF1Bib#…vWOLnrk9t8GIYnM
octonet-exporter is written in Java and has been tested fine on Windows 11, Devuan GNU/Linux 6 and macOS Tahoe.
AI disclousure: I do use an LLM-based line-autocompletion tool, but the program logic, I came up with by myself.
Thanks for reading and happy DXing!
Cheers,
Fey