monitoring

Internet Service Providers are almost universally despised. They've pushed for the FCC to continue defining 25 Mbps as "high use" broadband, and on top of that they overstate the quality of service they provide. A recently-released map of broadband availability in the US paints a pretty dire picture:

Here in St. Louis—where I guess I should count my lucky stars we have 'high use' broadband available—I have only two options: I can get 'gigabit' cable Internet from Spectrum, or 75 megabit DSL from AT&T.

That's it.

And you're probably thinking, "Gigabit Internet is great, stop complaining!"

I recently wrote about using a Raspberry Pi to remotely monitor an Internet connection, and in my case, to monitor Starlink (SpaceX's satellite Internet service).

One other important thing I wanted to monitor was how much power Starlink used over time, and I was considering just manually taking a reading off my Kill-A-Watt every morning, but that's boring. And not very accurate since it's one point in time per day.

So... recently I acquired a Starlink 'Dishy', and I'm going to be installing it at a rural location near where I live, but since it's a bit of a drive to get to it, I wanted to set up a Raspberry Pi to monitor the Starlink connection quality over time.

I know the Starlink app has its own monitoring, but I like to have my own fancy independent monitoring in place too.

The wrinkle with a Starlink-based Internet connection, though, is that SpaceX is using Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT) on their network, so there won't be any kind of IPv4 address I could reach the Pi at, nor does SpaceX yet have IPv6 set up in their network.

So to make remote access possible, I would have to find a way to have the Pi reach out to one of my servers with a persistent connection, then I could 'tunnel' through that server from other locations to reach the Pi.

tl;dr: After the fall 2019 firmware/bootloader update, the Raspberry Pi 4 can run without throttling inside a case—but only just barely. On the other extreme, the ICE Tower by 52Pi lives up to its name.

Three options for keeping the Pi 4 cozy: unmodified Pi 4 case, modded case with fan, and the ICE Tower.

A few months ago, I was excited to work on upgrading some of my Raspberry Pi projects to the Raspberry Pi 4; but I found that for the first time, it was necessary to use a fan to actively cool the Pi if used in a case.

Two recent developments prompted me to re-test the Raspberry Pi 4's thermal properties:

I've long used Munin for basic resource monitoring on a huge variety of servers. It's simple, reliable, easy to configure, and besides the fact that it uses Perl for plugins, there's not much against it!

Last week, I got a notice from my 'low end box' VPS provider that my Munin server—which is aggregating data from about 50 other servers—had high IOPS and would be shut down if I didn't get it back into an allowed threshold. Most low end VPSes run things like static HTML websites, so disk IO is very low on average. I checked my Munin instance, and sure enough, it was constantly churning through around 50 iops. For a low end server, this can cause high iowait for other tenants of the same server, so I can understand why hosting providers don't want applications on their shared servers doing a lot of constant disk I/O.

Using iotop, I could see the munin-update processes were spending a lot of time writing to disk. And munin's own diskstats_iops plugin showed the same:

If you're running Kubernetes clusters at scale, it pays to have good monitoring in place. Typical tools I use in production like Prometheus and Alertmanager are extremely useful in monitoring critical metrics, like "is my cluster almost out of CPU or Memory?"

But I also have a number of smaller clusters—some of them like my Raspberry Pi Dramble have very little in the way of resources available for hosting monitoring internally. But I still want to be able to say, at any given moment, "how much CPU or RAM is available inside the cluster? Can I fit more Pods in the cluster?"

So without further ado, I'm now using the following script, which is slightly adapted from a script found in the Kubernetes issue Need simple kubectl command to see cluster resource usage:

Usage is pretty easy, just make sure you have your kubeconfig configured so kubectl commands are working on the cluster, then run:

Since this is something I think I've bumped into at least eight times in the past decade, I thought I'd document, comprehensively, how I get Munin to monitor Apache and/or Nginx using the apache_* and nginx_* Munin plugins that come with Munin itself.

Besides the obvious action of symlinking the plugins into Munin's plugins folder, you should—to avoid any surprises—forcibly configure the env.url for all Apache and Nginx servers. As an example, in your munin-node configuration (on RedHat/CentOS, in /etc/munin/plugin-conf.d, add a file named something like apache or nginx):

Now, something that often trips me up—especially since I maintain a variety of servers and containers, with some running ancient forms of CentOS, while others are running more recent builds of Debian, Fedora, or Ubuntu—is that localhost doesn't always mean what you'd think it means.

Recently, I upgraded one of my CentOS and Ubuntu servers to a new version of Munin 2.0.x, and started getting an error stating that munin-update.lock already exists:

Munin hadn't been updating for a couple weeks, so I finally deleted the existing munin-update.lock file, and munin started running again. If this doesn't help solve your problem, have a look inside the various munin log files in /var/log/munin/ to see if one of them contains more details as to why munin isn't working for you.

Edit: There's a module for that™ now: Pingdom RUM. The information below is for historical context only. Use the module instead, since it makes this a heck of a lot simpler.

Pingdom just announced that their Real User Monitoring service is now available for all Pingdom accounts—including monitoring on one site for free accounts!

This is a great opportunity for you to start making page-specific measurements of page load performance on your Drupal site.

To get started, log into your Pingdom account (or create one, if you don't have one already), then click on the "RUM" tab. Add a site for Real User Monitoring, and then Pingdom will give you a

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