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sysmon-mqtt — Simple system monitoring over MQTT

A simple shell-script to capture a handful of common metrics and push them over MQTT to Home Assistant.

This script has been tested on recent versions of various Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS, Armbian, Alpine, and DD-WRT) on AMD64, ARM(64) and RISC-V based devices. Given its relative simplicity, it probably works on virtually any Linux device that allows installing a handful of (generic) dependencies.

Until December 2023, this script was part of my Home Assistant configuration-repository – release history prior to that point is preserved in 📄 HISTORY.md.

Metrics

Currently, the following metrics are provided:

  • cpu_load — the 1-minute load as a percentage of maximum nominal load (e.g. for a quad-core system, 100% represents a 1-minute load of 4.0)
  • cpu_temp — CPU temperature in degrees Celsius (read from /sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp – omitted if not available)
  • mem_used — memory in use (excluding buffers and caches) as a percentage of total available memory
  • uptime — uptime in seconds
  • status – overall status of the system (systemd-only; as reported by systemctl is-system-running)
  • bandwidth — average bandwidth (receive and transmit) for individual network adapters in kbps during the monitoring interval
    • For wireless adapaters, signal-strength is also reported (detection based on adapter name matching the wl*-pattern; requires iw-binary)
  • rtt – average round-trip (ie, ping) times in ms to one or more hosts
  • apt — number of APT packages that can upgraded
    • This assumes a Debian(-derived) distribution; the APT-related metrics are automatically disabled when no apt-binary is present
  • reboot_required — Reports 1 if a system reboot is required as a result of APT package upgrades

The metrics are provided as a JSON-object in the sysmon/[device-name]/state topic.

Additionally, the version of the running sysmon-mqtt-script is provided in sysmon/[device-name]/version.

Heartbeat

A persistent sysmon/[device-name]/connected topic is provided as an indication of whether the script is active. Its value works as a "heartbeat": It contains the Unix timestamp of the most recent reporting iteration, -1 while the script is initialising, and 0 if the script was gracefully shutdown.

In case a stale timestamp is present, it may be assumed the script (or the machine its running on) has crashed / dropped from the network. Stale is best defined as three times the reporting interval. For the default configuration that would amount to 90 seconds.

When the script starts, a heartbeat of -1 is reported until the script's second iteration; this is done because some of the metrics (bandwidth, rtt and apt) are – due to various technical reasons – only reported from the second iteration onwards...

Home Assistant discovery

By default, the script publishes Home Assistant discovery messages to the homeassistant/sensors/sysmon topic.

These messages are retained. Any new instance of the script started with an already present device-name will re-use the existing sensor-entity unique_id values (and thus "adopt" the previous instance's sensors in Home Assistant). This behaviour is intended to allow "fixed" sensor-entities in Home Assistant (which can easily be customised via the GUI).

The apt-metric is presented as a Home Assistant Update-entity. For its "entity-picture" to show, copy the images from 📂 /extras/wwww into a folder named 📂 sysmon-mqtt in your Home Assistant's local webroot.

To unregister (a set of) metrics from Home Assistant, simply remove the device from the MQTT integration (under Settings).

APT-check

The APT update check refreshes its status once per hour; by default it stores this status in a temporary file. It is possible to change this behaviour by setting the SYSMON_APT_CHECK environment variable to a filename of your choice (eg. ~/.apt-check). In this way, APT-check's status output can be used by other scripts.

The contents of the status file are as follows:

<# of package upgrades available>

"The following packages can be upgraded:\n\<list of upgradable packages>"

The first line is either 0 or a positive integer, the second line is empty and the third line contains a list of upgradable packages. The third line is JSON-encoded and (due to a Home Assistant imposed limit) restricted to a maximum of 255-characters (prior to JSON-encoding).

While APT-check refreshes its status, the file is empty. This is done to prevent leaving stale information in case of failures. There is thus a small chance of a race-condition: To prevent this, wait until the status file has a non-zero size before continuing...

Setup

The script depends on bash, gawk (alternative versions of awk are not supported; you need GNU awk), jq, and mosquitto-clients.

Additionally, apt and iw are required to report APT status and WiFi signal-strength respectively – missing these dependencies is handled gracefully.

When running on embedded/minimal systems (e.g. DD-WRT, or OpenWRT), apart from the above dependencies, coreutils most likely needs to be installed. In case this package is further split up (like on Entware), install coreutils-mktemp, coreutils-nproc, and coreutils-timeout.

Broker

The script assumes the MQTT broker to be Mosquitto (and uses this assumption to validate the broker configuration).

Furthermore, the script relies on MQTT-persistence to persist unique_id values for Home Assistant sensor-entities in between restarts (of either the script or the MQTT broker). Ensure the broker has persistence (for at least QoS level-1 messages) enabled. Otherwise, the unique ids used in Home Assistant will be dynamic (causing duplicate entities to be created after each restart)...

Usage

From the shell:

./sysmon.sh [--daemon] mqtt-broker device-name [network-adapters] [rtt-hosts]
  • --daemon (optional) – enable daemon-mode; start a watchdog to monitor the main sysmon-mqtt process
  • mqtt-broker — hostname or IP address of the MQTT-broker
  • device-name — human-friendly name of the device being monitored (e.g., "My Raspberry Pi"); a low-fidelity version (my_raspberry_pi) is automatically generated and used to construct MQTT-topics and Home Assistant entity-ids
  • network-adapters (optional) — one or more network adapters to monitor as a space-delimited list (e.g., 'eth0 wlan0'; mind the quotes when specifying more than one adapter)
    • If the adapter's name matches wl*, signal-strength is also reported
  • rtt-hosts (optional) — one or more hosts to which to monitor the round-trip time as a space-delimited list (e.g., '8.8.8.8 google.com'; mind the quotes when specifying more than one hostname)

The following optional environment variables can be used to further influence the script's behaviour:

  • SYSMON_HA_DISCOVER (default: true) — set to false to disable publishing to Home Assistant discovery topic
  • SYSMON_HA_TOPIC (default: homeassistant) — base for the Home Assistant discovery topic
  • SYSMON_HA_VERSION (default: 202308) — specify Home Assistant version compatibility (as YYYYMM); based on this some behaviours are modified:
  • SYSMON_INTERVAL (default: 30) — set the interval (in seconds) at which metrics are reported
    • In principle, the interval can lowered all the way down to zero for real-time reporting (which will negatively impact system performance)
    • When rtt-hosts are provided, the script automatically enforces a minimum reporting interval to ensure the ping-command(s) have sufficient time to complete
  • SYSMON_APT (default: true) — set to false to disable reporting APT-related metrics (apt and reboot_required)
    • Automatically disabled when no apt-binary is present, or when running inside a Docker-container (see below)
  • SYSMON_APT_CHECK (default: «temporary file») — override the location of the file used to store APT-check's status
  • SYSMON_RTT_COUNT (default 4) — number of ping-requests to send per iteration over which to average the round-trip time
  • SYSMON_DAEMON_LOG (default ~/sysmon-mqtt.log) — file to redirect all output to when running in daemon-mode

Echo the sysmon-mqtt version and exit:

./sysmon.sh --version

Daemon-mode

As of version 1.3.0, sysmon-mqtt includes a simple daemon to ensure the main monitoring process keeps running (ie, is restarted if it terminates). This is primarily intended for embedded devices running minimal Linux-distributions lacking amenities like Docker or systemd.

When started with --daemon as its first argument, sysmon-mqtt will start in daemon-mode and fork off a child-process to do the actual work (all arguments after --daemon are passed directly to this child-process). Whenever the child-process exits, it will be restarted by the daemon after waiting SYSMON_INTERVAL seconds.

All output is redirected to 📄 ~/sysmon-mqtt.log – this can be controlled via the SYSMON_DAEMON_LOG environment variable.

To stop the daemon, send a SIGKILL the daemon-process.

Docker

The most straightforward (if slightly constrained) way of running the script is via the Docker-container published on Docker Hub and GHCR. Container images are available for amd64, arm64, and armhf.

For bandwidth monitoring to work, you'll need to mount the host's /sys-sysfs into the container (as is done in the below 📄 docker-compose.yml). Alternatively, you can use network_mode: host – if you need WiFi signal-strength measurements, use the latter approach (iw relies on the physical network adapter being accessible; mounting /sys doesn't suffice).

The /sys-approach is preferred as it's more flexible (ie, it can be used to gather additional information such as the device model) and offers better security: The container's network remains isolated; instead it gains read-only access to /sys with Docker's AppArmor policies applied to prevent access to sensitive information.

These AppArmor policies currently prevent reporting the device model from inside the container though 😵 — see moby#434199 for details. Until that issue is resolved, you'll need to run a privileged container (easiest, if slightly too broad, is via privileged: true) which is not worth the risk just to have the proper device model reported.

As of version 1.3.0, sysmon-mqtt falls back to a more generic device model in case it can't read from /sys/firmware (e.g., "Raspberry Pi 4 Model B Rev 1.2" becomes "BCM2835").

If you don't care about bandwidth monitoring (and/or the device model), the /sys-mount can be removed.

Finally, the APT-related metrics are automatically disabled when running inside a Docker-container. They would report the container's state instead of the host's state and thus make no sense. Attempting to "push" this information into the container is unwieldy/infeasible (and probably undesirable too).

docker-compose.yml

version: "2.3"
services:
  sysmon-mqtt:
    image: thijsputman/sysmon-mqtt:latest
    restart: unless-stopped
    # Mount host's /sys-sysfs (read-only) into the container
    volumes:
      - /sys:/sys:ro
    # Alternatively, use host networking...
    # network_mode: host
    # ...or run in privileged mode (strongly discouraged)
    # privileged: true
    environment:
      - MQTT_BROKER=
      - DEVICE_NAME=
      # Optional: Specify network adapters for bandwidth monitoring and/or
      # hostnames for round-trip times
      - NETWORK_ADAPTERS=
      - RTT_HOSTS=
      # Optional: Drop permissions to the provided UID/GID-combination
      - PUID=
      - PGID=

The optional environment variables provided above can of course be passed into the Docker-container to further modify its behaviour.

systemd

Alternatively, it's possible to run the script as a systemd-service using something along the lines of the below configuration:

📄 /etc/systemd/system/sysmon-mqtt.service

[Unit]
Description=Simple system monitoring over MQTT
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target
StartLimitIntervalSec=120
StartLimitBurst=3

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=30
# Update the below match your environment
User=[user]
ExecStart=/usr/bin/env bash /home/<user>/sysmon.sh \
  mqtt-broker "Device Name" [network-adapters] [rtt-hosts]
# Optional: Provide additional environment variables
Environment=""

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

This unit configuration aims to start sysmon-mqtt after the network comes online. For this to work properly, the output of the below command should be enabled on your system.

systemctl is-enabled systemd-networkd-wait-online.service

Reload, enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable sysmon-mqtt
sudo systemctl start sysmon-mqtt

To facilitate this setup process, a setup-script (suitable for Debian(-derived) distributions) is provided: 📄 install.sh. Once installed, running the script again will pull the latest version of 📄 sysmon.sh from GitHub.

The script requires mqtt-broker and "Device Name" to be provided. Optionally, network-adapters and rtt-hosts can also be passed in:

./install.sh mqtt-broker "Device Name" "eth0 wlan0" "router.local 8.8.8.8"

Alternatively, if the service is already installed, the installer can be called without arguments to pull the latest version of the script:

./install.sh

For the very brave, the script can be run from GitHub directly:

curl -fsSL https://github.com/thijsputman/sysmon-mqtt/raw/main/install.sh |
sudo -E bash -s - \
mqtt-broker "Device Name" "eth0 wlan0" "8.8.8.8 google.com"