Malaria

Malaria is a pluggable system for gathering current system data points and publishing them to an MQTT service. The intention is to provide a basic shim project that people can add python code snippets to, and have that data reported to a mosquitto server for other systems to subscribe to.

The idea is to keep this simple and small but very easy to extend with new features. Plugins can be added in a few lines of boiler plate plus whatever you want to monitor. Malaria works best for users when it's running on every system they use, reporting to a centralised (and/or replicated) Mosquitto server, then the events generated in the mosquitto server can be tied into other processes which act on them accordingly.

Malaria is intended to generate dense amounts of sometimes changing data, some of these data points are useful for charting and general monitoring, where as others provide structure which can be used as metadata. There are some limitations to this kind of monitoring. For instance we don't want to generate huge amounts of fast changing data which is useless like the kind of data we might see for system processes or incoming network connections. These types of data collection would have gaps, and hit performance un-necessarily.

Features

Monitor NUT UPSMON
Monitor CPU temperature and usage
Monitor disk usage and io
Monitor Waveshare UPS backpack for Raspberry Pi
Monitor Raspberry Pi internal temperature
Monitor online/offline and network connections
Monitor system load average
Monitor system users

Installation

sudo apt install smartmontools
sudo python3 setup.py install
sudo malaria_setup

# Make any appropriate changes to /etc/malaria/config.json
sudo service malaria start

Configuration

The configuration file is a simple JSON document to allow easy validation and editing in modern editors. Once installed it can be found in /etc/malaria/config.json

The basic required configuration looks like this.

{
    "log_file": "/var/log/malaria.log",
    "update_interval": 10,
    "mosquitto": {
        "host": "192.168.1.3",
        "port": 1883,
        "username": "blaster",
        "password": "blasted",
        "base_topic": "Malaria"
    },
    "plugins": {
    }
}

Plugin configuration

Plugins can be designed to take in extra configuration parameters on initialisation these are passed to the init function, and can also have default values associated with them. Required values which are omitted will prevent the plugin from initialising and will generate an exception in the logs.

Here's an example using the INA219 backpack from waveshare on an old Raspberry Pi 1, which used i2c_bus 0 rather than 1 like the newer Pis.

"INA219": {
    "enabled": true,
    "addr": 66,
    "i2c_bus": 0
}

Contributions

All contributions will be considered, useful ones which are clear and concise will likely get accepted quickly.