In this post I want to describe how Pushover and Grafana are helping me to get some important push notifications of my life, health, home and nerdy stuff.
Disclaimer: I hate to be full of useless push notifications! For that I have really few push notifications active on my phone, as always I’m a minimalistic guy and I like to focus on few things that are important. If I receive a push, it must be useful, so I blocked all the useless (maybe also dangerous) push notifications, consequentially this is not a post that would explain how to get dozens of pointless notifications. Although at first it might appear as such.
Indeed at the beginning this post can sound like “What an annoying things receive all of these notifications”. But instead I found some of these notifications very useful, that have improved the quality of my life (especially the weather and home notifications). And I’m receiving only the notifications that I’m sure I need and want.
Introduction
Getting back on topic: why Grafana and Pushover?
Because almost all apps can only send a push when “something” happens, but not when it happens for x time or when the value comes back to normal.
For example:
I want an alert if the external pressure drops below 990mb but also when the pressure returns above 990mb.
Or I want to have a notification when a sum of my home appliances (like a wash machine) consumption is above 1.5Kwh, but only if this happens for more than 5mins.
Or a push when the temperature in the bedroom is low, but not after few minutes (that means I’m only changing the air), only after 30 minutes (that means it’s cold or I forgot the window opened). Or the same when the CO2 in my bedroom is above 1000ppm for more than 1 hour, and more important, I want to know when it goes back below 1000ppm (translated, when I open the window to change the air).
All of these conditions can be executed/met by the Grafana alert manager. And not with the Netatmo app, where you can get the push when the temperature is low but you can’t change the trigger time, or you can’t get a push when the conditions are back to normal. Same for the other similar apps.
In addition I want to have these notifications with a different sound/warning depending on the account that is receiving the notifications.
In order to understand if the just received push is a important notification without read it but only listening the sound of it (for example “high CO2 in bedroom” or a useless one “SQM traffic high”).
All of these fancy stuff can be achieved by using Grafana as Alert Manager and Pushover as a notifications delivery system. But it’s not easy, neither complicated, I think it’s complex.
In order that you can better understand, and to make a recap, I’m using Pushover to get detailed notifications from:
- Home temperatures, air quality, pressure, noise, humidity, etc.. using the Netatmo weather station (2 internal +1 external modules)
- Leaving home scene executed from Home app/HomeKit
- Home network with OpenWrt router and AP
- Home wattage consumption, light turned ON, batteries level, etc..
- My 3 Raspberry PI temperatures, usage, updates that are my servers for Grafana, Pi-Hole, Homebridge
- Pi-hole ADs blocked or if a client is flooding the DNS server
(PS: I’m writing another post on how to integrate all of these data in Grafana and get daily/weekly/whenever report as png delivered to your mail when you want)
Until now my push alerts from Grafana/Pushover were not well formatted and I have never spent time on them, I was receiving the push alert with the title and a weird query… this terrible thing:
For these reasons I decided that I want to receive useful push notifications, that show me the value of the query/alert, a direct link to the panel ID + dashboard ID and from different accounts/sounds regarding l the importance and the instance, or environment, like home/weather/network/servers.
The final results
So after some investigations and test, this is my final result.
The summary of a push in the Lock Screen:
The detail of the alert if I tap on it:
And when the alert is resolved/back to normal:
This is the overall view of my Pushover app:
As you can see now the first thing I read is the title and name of the alert, then I can quickly view with a glance if the alert is firing or is resolved (using the emoticons ⚠️ and ❇️), the value of the query that is firing or is resolved, a link to the panel and a link to the dashboard. In addition the other stand
