How I monitor my OpenWrt router with Grafana Cloud
Format: Technical blog post (PDF) · Client: Grafana · Year: 2023
A first-person walkthrough of monitoring a home OpenWrt router by exporting Prometheus metrics and sending them to Grafana Cloud. It is approachable technical marketing: the product appears through a real project the writer actually built, explained step by step, with the reasoning left in. The excerpt below is the setup; the full post carries it through installing exporters, scraping, and building the dashboard.
Excerpt:
I’ve been an open source fan and user for many, many years, going back to before we defined the term “open source” and we called it “free software.” Whenever and wherever possible I prefer to have control over the software I run on my devices.
Case in point: My internet router runs OpenWrt, which is a free/open source Linux operating system designed to replace the software provided by the router’s manufacturer. You can install OpenWrt on a wide range of supported devices. When you do, you frequently end up with enhanced stability along with additional configuration options not available in the stock software.
In this post, I will describe how to monitor the functionality of my Linksys WRT1900AC router running OpenWrt using Grafana Cloud.
Interacting with OpenWrt
Along with the base operating system, the OpenWrt Project provides a large set of software packages you can install to customize how you use your hardware and what the software does. Most of those packages allow significant configuration options. This is how we will accomplish today’s goal.
There are two ways to interact with OpenWrt to install packages. You can log in to the router directly using ssh or, if you have it installed, you can use a web UI called Luci. An ssh connection gives you a Busybox shell that includes a useful subset of standard UNIX utilities.
Excerpt from “How I monitor my OpenWrt router with Grafana Cloud and Prometheus,” Grafana. Back to all writing samples.