OWL energy monitor to nagios

I have been able to get my CM160 owl energy monitor to provide data to nagios. This allows me to track energy usage in my house.

It’s disgraceful how bad Owl’s support is for linux users but it’s great to see the community being so active in writing drivers/support to make it a reality.

Here is my check_owl.sh – I run this as a nagios command:

meh=`tail -n 1 /var/log/owl.txt | cut -d' ' -f7`
/usr/bin/printf "power is $meh | $meh"
exit 0

Replace the path /var/log/owl.txt with your owl output log file.

To test it do:

tail -n 1 /var/log/owl.txt | cut -d' ' -f7

You should get a value as a response.

My nagios command(commands.cfg) looks like this:

define command{
  command_name check_owl
  command_line /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_owl.sh
}

and my service like this:

define service{
        use                             generic-service         ; Name of service template to use
        host_name                       localhost
        service_description             Power usage
        check_command                   check_owl!20!5
        action_url /nagiosgraph/cgi-bin/show.cgi?host=$HOSTNAME$&service=$SERVICEDESC$register
        }

Analogue August 2012 review and hiatus news

I’m back online after taking a month off to get things done in the real world. Analogue august is great for reviewing where I’m at and getting things lots of things done. I find my focus shifts back to what really matters and the lack of distraction of technology means all the small things I usually forget about actually get done.

In 4 weeks time I will finish my work for Primary Technology then I’m going on hiatus for some time which will hopefully give me some room to work on my other projects. This co-insides with my 30th birthday so it should be a pretty special/exciting time for everyone involved.

The team at Primary Technology have been running the whole show now since October 2011 so I’m confident that my absence wont cause any disruptions and should still leave them as the best company for Primary School ICT services.

I know a lot of people have been waiting on responses/emails from me and I can only apologize for my absence and hope to get back to you ASAP 🙂

Consider taking a month off from technology, you might find a life you didn’t know you had 🙂