Introducing monitoring plugin check_rpi_temp to measure and check Raspberry Pi board temperature

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on September 30th 2019 - Listed in Monitoring Hardware

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As I was working on a VOC sensor setup with Raspberry Pi, I also wanted to monitor the Pi's board temperature. Turns out on Raspbian there is already a command prepared for this:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ /usr/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp
temp=39.2'C

This Raspberry Pi is already integrated into an Icinga 2 monitoring. Wouldn't it be nice to use the already running NRPE server and have a plugin for this?

Introducing check_rpi_temp

Here you go: check_rpi_temp does exactly that. It reads the current temperature from the board, compares it against (optional) thresholds and can output data in either Celsius (default) or in Fahrenheit. Thanks to the performance data you can create historical graphs for the Raspberry Pi board temperature:

The usage is straight forward:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_rpi_temp.py -w 50 -c 60
RPI TEMP OK: Temperature 40.80 degrees c |rpi_temp=40.80;50.00;60.00;;

Or if you prefer Fahrenheit:

pi@raspberrypi:~ $ /usr/lib/nagios/plugins/check_rpi_temp.py -w 90 -c 105 -u f
RPI TEMP CRITICAL: Temperature 105.44 is higher than critical threshold (105.00) |rpi_temp=105.44;90.00;105.00;;

Using a different user

Important note: You need to make sure the user running the command is able to execute vcgencmd. For example if you use the 'nagios' user (default in an NRPE setup), the command fails:

nagios@raspberrypi:~$ /usr/bin/vcgencmd measure_temp
VCHI initialization failed

By default the "pi" and the "root" user are able to run this command. So either define a sudoers rule or create a new user with the same privileges as the pi user.

It's all on a public repo

I (probably) won't create a dedicated page in monitoring-plugins for this script; all the infos and the plugin itself is available on a dedicated repository on GitHub.

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