Applications and usage of the Arduino for monitoring software
In this post we will show you how simple it is to collect data from a temperature sensor using the Arduino platform and sending them to monitoring on OpMon.
What is Arduino?
Arduino is an open hardware platform and software which simplifies the microcontroller programming used to interact with a wide variety of electronic components.
Widely used for prototyping and electronics learning it is also employed in more practical purposes, due to its flexibility, compatibility and low cost, when compared with specialized equipment.
Since Arduino is a hardware with open specifications it has many compatible versions available, in addition to many “shields”, or adaptors, which implement various features such as network communications, radio-frequency, engine control, etc.
Implementation
The implementation uses a DHT11 temperature and humidity sensor and a led display of 4 bits to showcase the values collected and the status of the service. The communication and the power supply of the circuit are made through the USB port of a computer connected to the network.
Use of sensors for the Arduino hardware monitoring
How does it work?
For each particular monitoring cycle, Arduino performs a serial communication by the USB port sending the result which was collected on the sensor to a networked equipment that will try to pass this output through to the OpMon server using passive checks (nsca). For the implementation a staging server was used, however with the employment of an Ethernet “shield” and a few lines of programming the Arduino itself could send data to the monitoring server.
Conclusion
The implementation is pretty trivial but the possibilities are great, because with the use of an open and low cost platform such as Arduino the possibilities for monitoring can extend significantly. There are a large number of analog sensors available that can be used for physical measurement in many different environments, such as: datacenters, industries, energy distribution, telecoms, etc.
More information:
Some sensors available: Click here
To learn more about Arduino: Click here
More information about how to use the temperature sensor: Click here
Fernando Lunardelli
Software Engineer
