What is the best tool to manage/monitor lots of Rpi at the same time?

General Discussion
1

Hi,

I will soon need to manage an IT stock of 10 to 15 Rpi4 4gb.
I already have one for my personnal use, I use Webmin to monitor it. But it’s only suitable for one pi at a time for now.

So my question is : What would be the best way for me to be able to monitor a lot of Rpi (10 to 15) conveniently ? I would like to be able to manage file on them, being able to use ssh easily, and send batch commands to all of them at the same time. Being able to monitor temp and CPU usage would be great too. Is there a tool that would help to do that ? I don’t know what to search to be honest, I’m a begginer in this.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Have a good day.

2

I am not aware of something all of the things you ask, however I can suggest a few things:
SecureCRT (Win,Mac,Linux) or PAC (Linux) can send multiple commands.
Temperature and CPU usage can be retrieved via snmp and you can create graphs in MRTG,RRD etc.
Regarding file manipulation you can install sftp and use Filezilla.

3

Hi,

many thanks for your request. You could use Grafana and InfluxDB (both are available via dietpi-software). There are a couple of dashboards that can be used and might fit for your purposes.

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/10578

https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/928

4

Hi,
Thanks for your answer.

I’m having issues with Grafana, looks like it can’t retrieve the data :

[Album] imgur.com

I correctly installed InfluxDB and created the database, I don’t know what I did wrong.

Other question : How can I manage multiple pi at the same time ? For now, Grafana looks more advanced than Webmin but at terms it’s really similar.

Thanks in advance for your help.
Have a good day

5

would be good to know what guide you followed to setup the dashboard.

Grafana themselves will read the data from InfluxDB. Therefore you would need to ensure that all your RPi’s will send their sensor data to the InfluxDB

6

Same issue here. Were you able to find a resolution to this?

Thanks in advance!

7

maybe you can share some more information on your issue.

8

Apologies for not having done so earlier.

I installed InfluxDB first and set up the DB. Did the POST GET test and got a result.
I then installed Grafana and updated settings in the IP:3001 web interface. But I wasnt able to create any graph or even get the imported dashboard running (https://grafana.com/grafana/dashboards/10578). They all show no data.

Am i missing something?

9

Did you installed Telegraf as well? This is the agent responsible for collecting system data and have them stored in InfluxDB. This is quite a good guide on how to setup monitoring

https://medium.com/@dorian599/iot-raspberry-pi-container-and-system-monitoring-with-influxdb-telegraf-and-grafana-a1767c38c109

10

Hi Joulinar,

Unfortunately, this still doesn’t help and the dashboard still doesnt show any data. Any thoughts on diagnosing the problem?

11

Telegraf is configured and sending data to your InfluxDB?

12

Just got it working - had messed up the user credentials in the telegraf.conf file. Got it corrected. Works now, thanks!

PSA - For anyone struggling with this, go through the medium article posted above - really useful!

13

yeah that’s a good reason for not working connection :slight_smile:

Good that it is working now

14

Sorry, four years later :slight_smile:
Since I have been researching existing monitoring tools and everything felt too heavy for my purpose, I have created this RPi Monitor Dashboard: GitHub - nekromoff/rpi-monitor-dashboard: Raspberry Pi (and Linux) simple remote monitoring tool with dashboard for multiple RPi devices. It works for any Linux device.

It supports unlimited number of devices, requires just two files - one to report on a client and one to receive on a server and is fully flexible as what to report (any bash command will do). Now in v3 it also supports remote configuration and remote one-time commands as well as automatic code updates.

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