Pihole + Grafana + InfluxDB Dashboard

I wanted to add the metrics from my ad-blocker, the great Pihole to my executive dashboard. To create the dashboard I used Grafana to display the graphs and InfluxDB a the time-series backend database. I use a simple python script to get the metrics from pihole and record them in influxdb.
Grafana makes it easy to render them into a user friendly dashboard.

Installing Grafana and Influxdb is beyond the scope of this blog post but here is the scipt that I use to get the data from pihole and insert it into Influx.

After you’re getting data in your influx db you’ll have to create a grafana dashboard.

This is a list of how US Representatives voted on Net Neutrality in 2018:
Credit to reddit user truefalseequivalence

Since Alexa for Car is becoming available on Dec. 5th, 2018, I thought I would throw some pictures up of my Alexa installation before it was productized. It was novel at the time. I used a Verizon LTE Jetpack for cellular connectivity. I simply feed the audio into the Auxillary port in the car and tether wirelessly to the LTE modem. This is far from a noteworth project, it’s just something I did for fun and proof of concept.

I’m limited to about 80MB/s on downloads on my VPC at Digital Ocean, but I run Nzbget for downloading large files from usenet. It doesn’t take long to download at all, but out of curiosity I wanted to see if I could parallelize this and download multiple files at the same. I use Sonarr for searching usenet for freely distributable training videos which then sends them to NZBget for downloading. Since Sonarr can send multiple files to nzbget which get queued up, I figured I can reduce the queue by downloading them at the same time.

Using Ansible and Terraform (devops automation tools), I can spin up VPC on demand, provision them, configure them as nzbget download nodes and then destroy the instances when complete.

Showterm

I just found a neat tool that will let you record a bash session for playback / site linking. It’s called Showterm. Adding the playback video is as simple as adding an iframe to your page:

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<iframe src="https://showterm.io/7b5f8d42ba021511e627e" width="640" height="480"></iframe>

or pasting the url:

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http://showterm.io/7b5f8d42ba021511e627e

Here’s a sample:

Grafana + InfluxDB + scripts = Awesome

I have many interests and some of them have metrics that are useful or fun to watch. For example, I have investment in Bitcoin so it’s nice to be able to keep an eye on it periodically.
I decided to create a graphical “at a glance” dashboard for myself. I chose Grafana as the user interface / front end and InfluxDB a the time-series backend database to store the metrics. I use various scripts and applets to populate the data into Influx and Grafana makes it easy to
render them into a user friendly dashboard.

Some of the metrics I monitor are Pihole stats, the price of bitcoin, how many IPs get banned from my webservers and my network throughput.

Here’s my dashboard:

I’m limited to about 40MB/s on downloads on my VPC at Digital Ocean, but I run Sabnzbd for downloading large files from usenet. It doesn’t take long to download at all, but out of curiosity I wanted to see if I could parallelize this and download multiple files at the same. I use Sonarr for searching usenet for freely distributable training videos which then sends them to SABnzbd for downloading. Since Sonarr can send multiple files to sabnzbd which get queued up, I figured I can reduce the queue by downloading them at the same time.

Using Ansible and Terraform (devops automation tools), I can spin up VPC on demand, provision them, configure them as sabnzbd download nodes and then destroy the instances when complete.

The instances all run the same sabnzbd config and the instances use haproxy for round-robin distribution. I will probably change this to Consul, but I just wanted something quick so I used a basic haproxy config.

I put together a quick bash shell script to view system info at a glance. I know there are existing tools for this like inxi, but I wanted to put something together I can copypasta. This is specific to RHEL, Centos and Sci Linux but it can be easily adapted for other distros.

Inxi

inxi is a super handy system info utility. These days I typically work with ephemeral instances / microservers, so I just dispose of infrastructure that flakes out. Occassionally I’ll need to see what’s up with a box so I’ve put together some common invocations of inxi below for reference:

Common Invocations

Hexo is a simple, lightweight node blog framework. It didn’t include a SystemD Unit file, so I created one: