Can you monitor Finland’s total real-time power consumption with Zabbix? Of course, you can! By day, I am a monitoring tech lead in a global cyber security company. By night, I monitor my home with Zabbix & Grafana and do some weird experiments with them. Welcome to my blog about this project.
After my speech at the Zabbix Summit 2022, someone asked how deeply my wife is involved with this home monitoring project, and I responded back that she usually gives me ideas by accident. You know, she’s a funny and talkative person up to the point that I call her the comment track or the voice-over of my life, so even as a non-techie, she will for sure give me new ideas.
Well, this time she gave the idea for this post on purpose — now that winter and the dark days & nights are approaching fast, she asked if Zabbix could turn our decorative seasonal lights on and off based on the current electricity price.
Of course, it can! I am anyway already monitoring the current electricity price. But let’s take it further — using Zabbix, we can also check Finland’s current real-time power consumption. It would be kind NOT to turn on the lights even during the cheap hours if our power grid would be near its maximum limit.
Hello, Fingrid
Our electricity network Fingrid offers open data for all kinds of details about our power grid, one of them being the current electricity consumption. Using their services is free, all you need is to create an account to get an API key, so I tried if I can use the API with Zabbix. Well, Zabbix integration was easy, though, due to the time constraints set by our now-10-weeks-old-baby, this current version is a bit of a kludge and not yet finished. But hey, I have this blog to write!
So, after getting my API key, I created a new HTTP agent item to my Zabbix and did parse it with Zabbix JSONPath for the value.
Why the regular expression? The value was not returned in pure numeric format, and I know it must be just my JSONPath expression that has something wrong, but to get this working today, I just brute-forced the extra characters away. I’ll fix that one day. Maybe. The most important for now is that this works; the values shown are in megawatts.
What’s next?
Now that the groundwork has been done, albeit in an ugly way, in the near future (when we actually install the seasonal lights), I can start controlling them via smart power sockets and smart lights. Thanks to the total flexibility of Zabbix, I can then create triggers such as turn on seasonal lights if electricity cost is maximum of X EUR/kWh AND Finland’s power grid total consumption is not more than Y MWh AND time of day is something when we would be awake (we would turn the lights off during the graveyard hours in any case).
I have some additional research to do; I’m sure I can find out Finland’s total power grid capacity from somewhere, maybe even via Fingrid API (I first tried it about one hour ago). But, as this winter is going to be totally different than our usual winters, Zabbix can help you in this area, too.
I have been working at Forcepoint since 2014 and just like a small part of Forcepoint’s logo, I’m trying to be green as well. — Janne Pikkarainen
This post was originally published on the author’s LinkedIn account.
