fritzcollectd - A collectd plugin to monitor FRITZ!Box routers

Recently I set up collectd, graphite and grafana to gather and visualize statistics for the home network.

At this, I was particularly interested in monitoring my AVM FRITZ!Box router, especially because I experience some stability problems lately.

The router exposes its status information via UPnP and fortunately there was already a Python package available which allows to access the data from Python scripts: fritzconnection. Hence I decided to implement a module that can feed the data into collectd for further processing: fritzcollectd. (see the GitHub page for installation instructions)

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, this is how it looks:

This dashboard is accessible on Grafana.net.

Alternatives

At the time of writing, there were mainly two alternative approaches documented that are worth mentioning.

At first, there was only a snippet available which is based on a Perl script. Besides the statistics available over UPnP the example also collects additional data scraped from the router’s web interface. Unfortunately even the simple version wasn’t fast enough in my environment to retrieve the data reliably using a 10 second interval.

Secondly, if you cannot use Python or Perl plugins it is also possible to use collectd’s cURL-XML plugin to call the respective SOAP actions directly and parse the results with XPath.