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Flukso Energy Meter Monitoring Pack: Part 4: Seeing it all in action

This blog post is part of a series check out the other posts in this series:

• Part 1: How did I get data
• Part 2: Get data into SCOM from MySQL
• Part 3: Create the MP
• Part 4: Seeing it in action

So after all this hard work. To get the data into my MySQL dbase and into SCOM. What can I actually do with it?

This is the second part of  a far greater monitoring project I’m building to basically monitor my house but now I have control over the temperature and heating in my house using the Nest Thermostat monitoring pack AND can check on my power consumption and basically control my electrical bill.

I’ve created the views in the flukso monitoring view for electricity:

Nothing much we can do with this view as this is actually giving me a good reading. It’s in fact what we can do with the data which get into SCOM. Because this data is now into SCOM we can use this data to generate alerts when sudden peaks occur.

A cool one I have setup is the peak right around supper. We have an electrical furnace so when someone starts cooking at around 18h (6PM) I now get an alert becaus the total power consumption is above 4000 watt at that time…

So I know now perfectly well when I need to rush home to get in on time for dinner…

Now that I have this data in I can move forward and build a cool demo to show the added value of having this data in.

This is the second part of the puzzle of monitoring my house. In fact this process can also be used when having a solar power installation to see the generated energy on the graph.

In short notice I will be adding Water readings to the graph as well and have another few things I would like to add to the management pack to be able to patrol my house but more on that later.

Flukso Energy meter monitoring pack: Part 2: Get data into MySQL

This blog post is part of a series check out the other posts in this series:

• Part 1: Intro on the device used
• Part 2: Get data into MySQL
• Part 3: Get data into SCOM
• Part 4: Seeing it in action

So after we have successfully installed the device and data is flowing to the flukso website we get a nice graph on our dashboard which is available by logging into the website:

Cool… So now we get a clear overview of our energy consumption. But there’s nothing we can do with it basically. We can look at it. Make some adjustments but no alerts, no long term reports nothing…

So as I discussed in the first post there’s an open API which makes the data available locally. This is great. No need to retrieve the data from an external website. It stays inside my own network.

The setup was very similar to my Nest Thermostat approach because I had that framework already in place I planned to use it the same way and get the data in SCOM via the same process.

Again the heart of my setup is my trusty Synology DS412+ hosting my linux distro and my MySQL dbase instance:

How did I get data in?

The setup is very similar to my Nest Thermostat approach. To get the data queried out of the Flukso device I have used the script written by a fellow fluksonian PeterJ (yep that’s the official name of users of flukso): https://docs.google.com/file/d/13wB85cPx_5nykBq3ZShnClHa1rpkRE5edNEluMqxrFaCRlvJrD8Bn_6UDCs9/edit?pli=1

He uses a set of PHP scripts to get the data in.

A high level overview of the install:

• Connect to your Synology box with Winscp
• Copy the content of the files to /volume1/web/flukso (Make sure to follow the exact same paths as described on the google drive).
• Open settings.php and fill in the parameters requested:

[xml]

<?php
// Rename to settings.inc.php

// DB Settings
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘flukso’);
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘<fill in a user with rights to create dbase on your Mysql>’);
define(‘DB_PASS’, ‘<fill in the password of that user>);

// Flukso settings
define(‘FL_ADDRESS’, ‘ipaddressofflukso:8080/sensor’);
define(‘FL_PASSWORD’, ”); //for future use
define(‘FL_SENSOR1’, ‘sensor ID’);
define(‘FL_SENSOR2’, ”);
define(‘FL_SENSOR3’, ”);

// Meter settings
define(‘START_DAY’, ‘070000’);
define(‘END_DAY’, ‘230000’);
?>

[/xml]

• Note the sensor ID can be retrieved from the website in the sensor section (make sure to use the ID and not the token)

• Run the install.php script by accessing your synology via putty to gain a terminal access (more explanation check the Nest thermostat topic here)
• At this point the dbase should be created an ready to go:

• All left to do is create another line in the cron and restart it to get data flowing into our dbase and ready to get extracted by SCOM.
• The crontab which needs to be changed is located in /etc and is named crontab. The line is in red.

Note: make sure to use TABS between the different columns otherwise the line will be deleted with the next reboot. On a Synology box it is… I don”t know on other linux distro’s but better safe than sorry right:

• The line that needs to be added: */1    *    *    *    *    root    /usr/bin/php /volume1/web/flukso/cronjob.php

After this install the data should normally be coming in.

I’ve tried to create a brief overview on how to setup the Synology to get the data from the flukso into my own MySQL dbase using a community driven script. However this is a System Center blog so I’m not going to go further in detail here.

If you still have questions either check the flukso forum which has some really active members out there eager to help spread the word on this nifty device: https://www.flukso.net/forum

Or connect with me on twitter @dieterwijckmans so I can assist where needed.

Flukso Energy meter monitoring pack: Part 1: Intro on the device used

This blog post is part of a series check out the other posts in this series:

• Part 1: Intro on the device used
• Part 2: Get data into MySQL
• Part 3: Get data into SCOM
• Part 4: Seeing it in action

This post is part of an ongoing series on how to monitor my house with SCOM and build scenarios based on the data that comes into SCOM.

More info on the blog series here: http://scug.be/dieter/2014/02/19/monitor-your-home-with-scom/

After monitoring the temperature / humidity and heating in my house I now have turned my focus on the aspects that cost basically money. My electrical bill. To get this data in you need an energy meter. I actually have 2 at the moment so I can level them out to see which one is right… Boys and toys right.

They are both of Belgian companies but can be used on any power grid. The above device is called the smappee.

It’s a rather new device with a very spacy exterior and lighting. Indeed it’s connecting quite easy to your environment and it measures everything beautifully. The nice thing about this device is in fact it has a nice shiny app for iPhone and Android so you can get your data while on the road. The coolest thing is in fact that this device is capable of detecting certain patterns on your internal electrical grid to identify certain devices in your household so you can easily pinpoint what the big consumers of power are. This works quite well… The downside of this device however is that there’s up until now no way to get the data from the device towards your own device. This is not open source. Although there’s no additional fee for the website and the apps it’s kind of useless if you want to get the data out and play with it…

More info on the smappee can be found here: http://www.smappee.com/

The device just below is completely different. Although it serves the same purpose: monitoring your power consumption. This device is just a small box which holds a custom made device which was built from the ground up with the open source community in mind. The software is running on a linux distro, dd-wrt for the routing and you have the possibility to access it via a terminal to gain root access and play with the device. The data gathered is logged to the flukso server and nicely graphed on a custom dashboard protected by your user name and password. You get a nice overview of your consumption even in real time. Besides the electrical consumption you can also check water and gas consumption so an all-round device for a little bit less than the Smappee. The cool thing in fact is that you can access the data locally by checking the box in the admin dashboard. This opens up the local API which can be addressed by a simple CURL call.

More info on the Flukso can be found here: https://www.flukso.net/about

Installation?

The installation for both devices was straight forward. As soon as the device came online you needed to connect it to an account on the website and that was it… Now only to get the data into the device.

To use this you need to have a little background of electrical work. Both website come with a huge disclaimer if you are not confident with installing the metering device ask a professional.

What you need to do is clamp a power metering device over the hot wire of your electrical installation behind the meter and before the first fuse in your fuse box:

After connecting the clamp to the device you are good to go to get things monitored. Both devices use the same tech so if you have both just connect both of the clamps to the wire. No cutting is involved.

So this was a blog about System Center right?

True… But I’m also active in the flukso community and promised to give feedback to them as well how I cracked this box open to get all the data into a MySQL dbase. I’ve used a similar approach as the nest thermostat series which can be found here: http://scug.be/dieter/2014/02/19/nest-thermostat-monitoring-pack-part-i-how-did-i-get-data/

So how did I get data?

Still not much System center content but important for the people who are going to use this or try this at their home because face it… Monitoring is our profession and if we can save some money while we are at it… Check out the other parts to find out how I got data in.