Monitoring the Raspberry PI with RPI-Monitor

My Raspberry PI is, ,silently and tirelessly, doing its work as a headless server, mostly working as media-server thanks to MiniDLNA and SFPG gallery. Thanks to all this working silent and without asking maintenance I sometimes even forget about the Raspberry PI this is because I felt the need of looking for a tool that allowed me to check the Raspberry status trough a simple web interface.

RPI-Monitor

RPI-Monitor is a web-based monitoring application developed by RPI-Experiences. I got informed about it by reading its description on eLinux.org page. On the same page I also found detailed information on how to set-up repository and install RPI-Monitor package so that installing it has been a mere copy-and-paste exercise.

sudo apt-get install apt-transport-https ca-certificates
sudo wget http://goo.gl/rsel0F -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/rpimonitor.list
sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 2C0D3C0F
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rpimonitor

Once installed RPI-Monitor is available at port 8888 of Raspberry PI address

The “Start” button brings to RPI-Monitor status page where monitoring information is neatly exposed

the statistics page shows nice interactive diagrams of monitored parameters:

Some configuring

RPI-Monitor offers a wide selection of configuration options by allowing adding monitored parameters and enabling some add-ons. Many examples are provided on RPI-Monitor home page. I started by enabling the “Shellinabox” add-on that allows accessing the Raspberry SSH shell from a browser page.

I first installed Shellinabox:

sudo apt-get install shellinabox

Then enabled the relative add-on in RPI-Monitor editing configuration file

vi /etc/rpimonitor/data.conf

I removed comment in the shell-in-a-box add-on configuration and commented the add-on information section.

…

#web.addons.1.name=Addons

#web.addons.1.addons=about

web.addons.1.name=Shellinabox

web.addons.1.addons=shellinabox

…

I then restarted RPI-Monitor service

sudo service rpimonitor restart

Here is RPI-Monitor with Shellinabox working (after telling Firefox to trust Shellinabox self-signed certificate).