MISC-TN-029 — A monitoring system for IoT devices with Glances, InfluxDB, and Grafana

Info Box Applies to SBCSPG Applies to SBC Lynx Technical Notes Applies to IoT Applies to IoT Services Technical Notes

This technical note was validated against specific versions of hardware and software. It may not work with other versions.

History

Version	Date	Notes
1.0.0	September 2023	First public release

Introduction

When dealing with IoT fleets, one of the major concerns is monitoring the devices' health status. The "health status" is a generic expression that may include tons of parameters, ranging from the system-on-chip's temperature to the number of processes running in Linux's user space.

This Technical Note (TN for short) illustrates how to combine some well-known, open-source software to implement a monitoring system for such devices. It is based on:

• Grafana: visualization and analytics software.
• InfluxDB 2.0: a time series database.
• Glances: a cross-platform system monitoring tool written in Python.

In essence, the example described implements the following scheme.

TBD

The IoT device is an SBCSPG IIoT gateway running Debian Bullseye. An instance of Glances runs on SBCSPG for collecting data (CPU load, memory usage, network traffic, etc.). These data are pushed into InfluxDB. Grafana retrieves these data from the database and shows them in a beautiful dashboard.

For the sake of simplicity, Grafana and InfluxDB were installed on the same host, but they can indeed run on different machines.

Setting up InfluxDB 2.0 and Grafana

Getting the API token from Grafana

Grafana dashboard showing collected data

armbian@sbcspg:~/devel/glances$ python3 -m venv ~/devel/glances/venv/ armbian@sbcspg:~/devel/glances$ source env/bin/activate -bash: env/bin/activate: No such file or directory armbian@sbcspg:~/devel/glances$ source venv/bin/activate (venv) armbian@sbcspg:~/devel/glances$ pip install glances bottle influxdb Collecting glances

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Successfully built psutil ujson msgpack Installing collected packages: urllib3, six, idna, charset-normalizer, certifi, ujson, requests, pytz, python-dateutil, psutil, packaging, msgpack, defusedxml, influxdb, glances, bottle Successfully installed bottle-0.12.25 certifi-2023.7.22 charset-normalizer-3.2.0 defusedxml-0.7.1 glances-3.4.0.3 idna-3.4 influxdb-5.3.1 msgpack-1.0.6 packaging-23.1 psutil-5.9.5 python-dateutil-2.8.2 pytz-2023.3.post1 requests-2.31.0 six-1.16.0 ujson-5.8.0 urllib3-2.0.5 (venv) armbian@sbcspg:~/devel/glances$ pip install 'influxdb-client[ciso]' Collecting influxdb-client[ciso]

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Successfully built ciso8601 Installing collected packages: typing-extensions, reactivex, influxdb-client, ciso8601 Successfully installed ciso8601-2.3.0 influxdb-client-1.37.0 reactivex-4.0.4 typing-extensions-4.8.0 (venv) armbian@sbcspg:~/.config/glances$ cp -v ~/devel/glances/venv/share/doc/glances/glances.conf . '/home/armbian/devel/glances/venv/share/doc/glances/glances.conf' -> './glances.conf'

[influxdb2]

1. Configuration for the --export influxdb2 option
2. https://influxdb.com/

host=192.168.0.21 port=8086 protocol=http org=nicolargo bucket=glances token=ZWZfgKt6O_GS38xzRZIAEFwXfeCh1pyYIDfBXFaeGig9eJvzdi1pFKseXVq8n-rkJ1MD-7mPS>

1. Set the interval between two exports (in seconds)
2. If the interval is set to 0, the Glances refresh time is used (default behavo>
3. interval=0
4. Prefix will be added for all measurement name
5. Ex: prefix=foo
6. => foo.cpu
7. => foo.mem
8. You can also use dynamic values
9. prefix=foo
10. Following tags will be added for all measurements
11. You can also use dynamic values.
12. Note: hostname is always added as a tag
13. tags=foo:bar,spam:eggs,domain:`domainname`

(venv) armbian@sbcspg:~/.config/glances$ glances -q --export influxdb2