On the flightaware settings page there a place to get notified if the site is down, but the minimum period is 6 hours. Consequently, I use a 3rd party uptime monitoring service. However, the way it works is by checking if the site is accessible. If dump1090 is down for whatever reason but the site is still available, it doesn’t get noticed. It seems like this would be an obvious add-on to the scripts. Has anyone added such a thing?
Yesterday, my main feeder had such an issue. After multiple reboots, firming up all the connections, etc., I was getting data for just a few minutes before it conked out again. Figuring maybe it was the dongle going bad, I replaced the blue one with the orange one, and it’s been running fine ever since. I’m thinking now that maybe I have an inadequate power supply, so I’ve ordered another one.
Anyway, does anyone know of such an add-on? Ideally, it would email me when the number of messages received dropped to 0 for x amount of time.
Not a FA solution, but here is another way you could do that yourself at your end.
Usually when dump1090-fa fails like that, the service restarts a few times and then gives up completely. You could use a script or monitoring software like monit to monitor dump1090-fa, and then e-mail or otherwise notify you when that dump1090-fa process is not running for perhaps 5 minutes.
My Pi is here locally, but I have recently been playing with different ways to harden a Pi with things like the hardware watchdog timer, process monitoring and alerting software, and a few other things. I’ve also been testing usbreset which might possibly reset a USB dongle the next time it locks up enough that it normally requires a manual disconnect and plug in.
My dump1090-fa is very stable. My dump978-fa occasionally requires a manual restart once or twice a year.
An FA option to notify after a period of no traffic, even with connections would be very useful.
For notifications, you could use e-mail or a service like ntfy.sh . I use ntfy for very simple alerts like “system has rebooted” or “ssh login has occurred” for a remote VPS. It is very handy, and a simple command can do the notification through curl.
