Monitor your Pi

You can check the status of your Pi using SSH and typing some commands, of even run a shell script to simplify it. This could be a big chalange when you don’t have a big knowledge of Linux and Raspberry Pi. But it wouldn’t be Linux if there wasn’t an other way to do it.

RPi monitor gives you a basic view of the information about your RPI’s CPU core temp, CPU load, Uptime, … For the more advanced users there is the possibility to write your own add-ons.
Lets do the basic installation.

Installing RPi monitor

To install RPi monitor we are going to use the standard package manager from debian, APT.
Before we continue lets make sure our system is up to date.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade -y

In the upgrade command you see i added an -y this will make sure you don’t teed ty enter again when it asks you if you would like to install the updates. Even better, i won’t ask you.

To be able to install RPI monitor we’ll have to add the repository key and the repository list as it is not in the standard raspberry pi repository.

sudo apt install dirmngr -y
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2C0D3C0F

Add the repository list:

sudo wget http://goo.gl/vewCLL -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rpimonitor.list

Now on to the installation.
Since we added a repository we’ll have to update our lists again, then we can install the monitor software

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rpimonitor -y

If all went well we now should have RPimonitor installed and running on our Pi.
Before we go to our browser and check it out lets enable auto updating.

sudo /etc/init.d/rpimonitor update
sudo /etc/init.d/rpimonitor install_auto_package_status_update

If you want to disable this function simply execute following command

 sudo /etc/init.d/rpimonitor remove_auto_package_status_update

Using RPi monitor

After completion of the installation we can use the web-interface in a browser using the ‘8888’ port. So get your Pi’s ip address and lets have some fun.
For example:

http://raspberrypi.local:8888
http://192.168.2.20:8888

As said before RPi monitor has the possibility to add add-ons, eg: monitoring network, reading sensors. The received values will be available in the ‘statistics’ page. Configuring these add-ons isn’t simple and not for this tutorial.

Troubleshooting

Now since i started using this it seems that in some way the newer versions or an update in some other package restrain rpimonitor from starting on boot.
So fix this we will create a service.
Open a new systemd service file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/rpimonitor.service

In this file we are going to paste the following settings:

[Unit]
Description=RPi-Monitor daemon
Before=multi-user.target
After=remote-fs.target
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
Restart=on-failure
KillMode=mixed
Nice=19
ExecStart=/usr/bin/rpimonitord
ExecStop=/bin/kill $MAINPID
StandardOutput=append:/var/log/rpimonitor.log
StandardError=append:/var/log/rpimonitor.log

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Note: systemd version 236 or higher is needed for the append directive. Otherwise, use file instead. The difference is that the content of thoses files are overrides after each restart of rpimonitor. Type dpkg -l systemd to show your version.

Once we have saved this file we need to reload the deamon files and enable the rpimonitor service.

sudo systemctl daemon-reload 
sudo systemctl enable rpimonitor
sudo reboot now

After reboot you’ll see that the rpimonitor webservice is available

Credit to Leepic for sugesting this fix.