Graphing cubic meters gas usage

[Gluntzmaster]

Running Cacti 1.2.22 on a freshly installed Ubuntu jobby.

I've a 'smart' energy meter where I plugged a dongle in that can be queried by means of a script.
The Gas counter yields a number with three decimals. The decimal part is a fraction of a cubic meter gas usage, so I'd like to keep an eye on this decimal part, that's where the movement is

For instance my current gas counter is at 6526.853 M^3

Graphing this with COUNTER or GAUGE doesn't quite show enough granularity, it shows a pillar of 6526, the decimal changes aren't visible.

Same applies to KWH counters. What do you reckon how to best visualise these numbers?

Thanks,
Leo

[TheWitness]

Make sure you only return the decimal portion and nothing past the last digit. Trim the string with whatever language you are using.

[Gluntzmaster]

I gathered as much, thanks for conforming that. Using $rest=substr($net,4) in my php kludge seems to pan out.

Time for some experimentation, thanks for your support !

Leo

[TheWitness]

I would do something like

Code: Select all

$value = explode(' ', $value)[0];

The breaks the string into number + units and leaves you just the value removing the units from the value.

[Gluntzmaster]

I've been experimenting on and off with getting some sensible graphs out of my household's power meter. And yes, it can be done to some degree. Cacti accepts scripting just fine, it is up to the user to get some sensible results. Fortunately Cacti developers like The Witness are gladly lending assistanse.

That said, I have come to the conclusion that Cacti really comes to its own when it is used for what it originally intended to be a device grapher, preferably on the basis of SNMP.
A friend pointed me to Home Assistant, which is also an open source development geared towards IOT graphing. A breeze to set up in a virtual box VM, and a wealth of pre-cooked solutions.

I will never be able to compete with that in my efforts to achieve similar results in Cacti, especially when I compare it with the ease of setting up and maintaining a Home Assistant environment.

So I'm back to using Cacti for device management, and pinging stuff out there and this Home Assistant for all things IOT. Trying to get Cacti jump through hoops has had its value though, I learned a lot during this experiment.

@The Witness, as always thanks for your kind assistance !

Bye,
Leo

[TheWitness]

Leo,

I love the byline. Me and Windows go back to version 2.4 (very old circa 1984), and I could not agree more. For me it's a web browser and access to putty, github desktop and a few other niceties. From a Cacti and more broadly a monitoring perspective, Microsoft keeps breaking things that should remain unbroken in an effort to fix all the bugs introduced throughout the years and making harder and harder to unbreak them. It's like playing twister. The older we get, the harder it is to play.

Anyway, WRT Home Assistant, I hear you. Can you describe how it works? I would appreciate it.

[Gluntzmaster]

https://www.home-assistant.io is where everything about this community effort lives.
In short:
Easiest way of setting it up is configuring a VM in virtual box, plonk the HomeAssist precooked VM in there, have it access your LAN and let it scan your network. Once done you have access to
"Integrations"

Integrations.png (390.85 KiB) Viewed 4482 times

it has built in translators/api's for a whole host of devices and IOT gateways, like the home gateway for Ikea, NetAtmo, Somfy, etc.
The main use is twofold, you can build your own dashboard, and have the environment respond to scripts and automations based on the status of the monitored devices, and IFTTT rules you set up

Setup of a Dashboard is lemon squeezy

Dash_1.png (293.13 KiB) Viewed 4482 times

where the graphs are pretty much pre-cooked, and the user can latch the graphs on to the device and its functions (entities) to extract the data for the graph.

Next to eye candy you can also get some more down to earth graphs that are similar to what you can achieve in Cacti. as you can see in the Dash-2 image.

Dash_2.png (389.56 KiB) Viewed 4482 times

It is real easy to set these dashboards up. The Dash-1 image is a snazzy dash for the current state of things.

Mind you, all the server does is interrogate a dongle I've inserted in the home's smart energy meter, and the solar converter for which I have an API key.
The energy meter is queried once every second. (let that sink in... ) this dongle is a chatty little device. Makes me kind of feel like an old coot, forever trying to conserve bandwith for the users instead of metering and monitoring.. That was back then..

So there you have it, a short rundown on HomeAssistant from a cacti perspective. Lots of graph types, you can create Cacti style graphs bu cacti at present can't present the gauges and other eye-candy that H.A. can.

It's fun to set up, has a decent foundation and active community and is packed with features.

Bye,
Leo

[TheWitness]

Wow, that's too connected of a house But it all looks good. The advantage of a small setup like this, and the strength of the streaming protocol, is that you can sustain 1 second updates from even dozens of devices. It's real nice.