New Relic : Monitoring a home solar array with New Relic One

This is cool. Do you have any idea how long it would take me to make something like this out of python, pandas, and matplotlib? A while. And it would look like garbage. New Relic One is much, much better.

I find myself staring at the dashboard like it's a new baby, watching it breathe and marveling that it exists. It just works. It's really nice to have this data and be able to get to it anywhere without having to run a container on a server in my house and port-forward to it or VPN into my home network.

I've also got an alert when the batteries drop down below their reserve percentage, which would indicate that my house has lost power and the batteries are running low. New Relic has a whole lot of things I could fiddle with.

Now that I have this dashboard I can't see doing without it. The power it gives me to query and analyze my own data, and to do it using a set of proper tools, is really refreshing. I have visions of trying to build predictions to see how much power I might draw given a particular time of year and amount of cloud coverage. I could set up alerts that trigger if I draw no power when I think I should, or if something goes weird with the gateway (like if it starts telling me I'm exporting power from my house or to the solar array).

I could see a future where I dump all the other stuff from my home devices into New Relic One and build myself a panopticon. I have a lot of IoT (Internet of Things) devices in my house, as I think most of us do, such as smoke detectors, a fairly robust Ubiquiti wi-fi setup, a Raspberry Pi that does DNS and DHCP and Pi-hole, a printer, a smobot, a few heat pumps, a TV, a cable modem, a NAS, a pile of Sonos gear, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten. Oh, and a dozen devices or more: laptops and phones and tablets for the family. And I don't have a dozen people in my family. (Geez, that's a whole lot of stuff. it's stunning how IoT just invades your house.)

I don't think most of those have APIs, which of course means my ability to pull data from them is pretty much zero, but it would be really, really neat to build a whole-house dashboard I could monitor from anywhere. As long as I can get data from them, New Relic One would be a great place to send it.

I also have a couple of small personal websites that use New Relic Synthetics (free account for the win!) to monitor and Cloudflare-also a free account-to run. And the most exciting to a network geek-I also have a home router that can export IPFIX, so I can use New Relic Network Performance Monitoring. But that'll be a whole separate blog post.