Raspberry Pi Network Monitor Installation
Cloud and hosted solutions are becoming more and more popular, which makes monitoring network performance more important than ever. Luckily, Obkio’s Raspberry Pi network monitor allows you to easily monitor network performance with a Raspberry Pi — without the complexities of many of the open source solutions on the market. Keep reading for the complete Raspberry Pi network monitor installation.
Table of Contents
- Why Use a Raspberry Pi Network Monitor
- Raspberry Pi Network Monitor Installation
- How to Monitor Raspberry Pi Network Performance
- Getting Started with Obkio
Why Use a Raspberry Pi Network Monitor
Cloud and hosted solutions (ex: VoIP and SaaS), network architectures are changing and network monitoring solutions need to keep up.
We’re moving away from centralized monitoring in data centers and towards performance monitoring from the end-user perspective. This way, IT teams get more visibility and information about the quality of experience for the end-users, which is what matters most in the end.
Network monitoring with Raspberry Pi will help you do just that.
Raspberry Pi Network Monitor Installation
Network Monitoring, or more specifically, Network Performance Monitoring (NPM) is the continuous monitoring of network performance, or your business’ core network infrastructure to establish a performance baseline, monitor network issues, and identify any network performance degradation.
When you’re looking to deploy a network monitoring tool or probe (which we call Monitoring Agents), you could use any dedicated network device but SBCs are the cheapest, and the Raspberry Pi is the most popular out of them all — which is what makes it so ideal to use.
1. Deploy Network Monitoring
Most of the Raspberry Pi network monitors on the market are open source, which are complicated to use and require the skills of a system admin to deploy. Not everyone has those skills, but you don’t actually need them to deploy a Raspberry Pi network monitor.
Obkio Network Monitoring SaaS is an end-to-end network monitoring software that can be installed on Raspberry Pi to monitor any network infrastructure.
Obkio is not open source, but it’s designed to be simple and easy to use for the whole IT team — not just network admins. Using Obkio’s free-trial or free plan, you can start network monitoring on Raspberry Pi in just 10 minutes!
Follow Obkio’s Getting Started tutorial to begin.
2. Install Raspbian
Once you’ve deployed Obkio, the next step for network monitoring with Raspberry Pi is installing Raspbian (the Raspberry Pi Debian Linux distribution) on the Raspberry Pi device.
If you are new to the Raspberry Pi initial setup, we recommend you follow the official Tutorial for setting up your Raspberry Pi. Other Raspberry Pi Linux distributions should also work just fine.
If you are new to the Raspberry Pi initial setup, we recommend you follow the official Setting up your Raspberry Pi Tutorial. Other Raspberry Pi Linux distributions should also work just fine.
If you have any trouble with other distributions, you can post on the Community Forums.
3. Deploy Monitoring Agents
Once you finish installing the Raspberry Pi and have terminal access to it (SSH or Desktop), the installation should be very straight forward.
To monitor network performance from the end-user perspective you need to install probes, or as we call them, Monitoring Agents, in strategic network locations such as the head office, data centers, the Cloud, service provider networks, and of course, the remote offices where end-users are working.
For your Raspberry Pi network monitor, just follow the standard Software Agent Installation.
Ensure that you are user root by executing the command sudo su - before running the installation command provided in the App.
Like mentioned in Step 1, you can get started with Obkio’s 10 minute installation tutorial in which you will learn how to install a software agent (i.e. the Raspberry Pi) and two Public Monitoring Agents.
This way, you’ll have a full monitoring setup to start network monitoring with Raspberry Pi.
For more information about installing the Raspberry Pi network monitor, check out our installation guides:
How to Monitor Raspberry Pi Network Performance
The installation for your Raspberry Pi network monitor is as easy as it is any other Linux machine. One single line of command to copy & paste in a terminal and you’re good to go with your new Raspberry Pi network performance monitor.
All the updates will be done automatically, but you can follow the maintenance notice for Obkio’s Monitoring Agent updates on the System Status website.
With Obkio’s network monitoring solution deployed, the Monitoring Agents on your Raspberry Pi will start exchanging synthetic traffic (no packet capture required) to continuously monitor network performance and identify network problems.
1. Measure Network Metrics on Raspberry Pi
Your Raspberry Pi network monitor (using Obkio), will use synthetic traffic and UDP packet to measure key network metrics like packet loss, jitter, and latency and display them on Obkio’s Network Response Time Graph.
Measuring these network metrics allows you to quickly understand and identify any performance degradation in your network, which may be a sign of a network issue to come.
2. Monitor Network Devices with SNMP
Use Network Device Monitoring with SNMP Polling to monitor and proactively pinpoint issues with devices like firewalls, routers, switches and wifi access points.
In addition, Network Device Monitoring measures the health of your network devices with metrics like CPU and bandwidth usage.
3. Troubleshoot Network Problems with Traceroutes
With this setup, your Raspberry Pi network monitor will help you monitor network performance and identify network problems.
At this point, you will have access to valuable data from Obkio’s Features like dashboards, advance reporting, Speed Tests (to monitor network speed) and Obkio Vision: Visual Traceroute tool.
Obkio’s advanced visual traceroute tool detects exactly where and when network problems occurred by interpreting traceroute results for you and leveraging visual network maps, and Obkio’s Quality Score matrix.
Learn more about:
- Obkio Vision: Visual Traceroute Features
- How to Troubleshoot Networks with Obkio Vision Visual Traceroute
Getting Started with Obkio
Getting started with Obkio’s Raspberry Pi network monitoring tool is easy — and only takes 10 minutes.
You don’t have to be a network admin to understand the health of your network.
Originally published at https://obkio.com.
