Can Weewx send alerts if it stops reporting?

[John Park]

Hi everyone,

I absolutely love weewx - thank you so much to the community for providing this fantastic piece of software. Is there any way to have weewx to send reports if it stops reporting for some reason? There's been a few times where my weather station has stopped reporting and I had no idea until I manually checked my weather station. Weather Underground used to send alerts if it stopped receiving updates but this appears to have stopped working some time ago. I've sent numerous emails to wunderground but I haven't received a response - in fact, it looks like wunderground is really driving their service into the ground, but that's another matter.

A simple email alert would be ideal... If anyone has done this or can point me towards a solution, I'd very much appreciate it!

Cheers,

John

[pon...@gmail.com]

If you upload data also to weathercould.net you'll get an alert when uploads stop.

A ykush device from yepkit.com can help if the reason for the failure is a USB lockup on a Fine Offset WH1080.

[Liz]

I've set up a cron job looking for failure, and it is to restart weeWx if
necessary. I'm not sure if it has been triggered, but occasionally the
Davis stops talking to the USB bus, and a restart of weeWx helps.
Liz

[John Park]

Thanks for the tip. I signed up and started uploading data to Weathercloud but it looks like you need to pay a subscription for alerts unfortunately.

[Thomas Keffer]

John,

What kind of weather station? Most of the drivers either use a timeout, or a separate thread to detect an unresponsive station. It would help if we knew what kind of station you have.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2019 at 3:46 AM Liz <ed...@billiau.net> wrote:

I've set up a cron job looking for failure, and it is to restart weeWx if
necessary. I'm not sure if it has been triggered, but occasionally the
Davis stops talking to the USB bus, and a restart of weeWx  helps.
Liz

I really discourage this approach. WeeWX should not crash --- if it does, it's a bug. I've had instances run for two years or more at a time. If your Vantage stops talking to the bus, it should cause a timeout, and WeeWX will recover. If this happens again, I would greatly appreciate seeing the log. 

I would much rather engineer out any glitch, rather than paper it over!

-tk

[Andrew Milner]

Tom

Whilst I agree with what you are saying there are also occasions where the problem may be, for example, with a router which requires rebooting.  Whilst weewx will keep merrily reporting the upload failure(s) in the log WU also used to helpfully send an email when the station had not reported for two hours.  These emails have now stopped.  I often find the issue on the next day only because I run wunderfixer twice a day and also use logwatch.  There is a potential need for having an inbuilt failure alert system within weewx for sending an advisory email in the event of upload failures for two or more hours instead of just logging the error as currently happens.  Food for thought perhaps??

[vince]

On Monday, March 11, 2019 at 7:04:10 AM UTC-7, Andrew Milner wrote

There is a potential need for having an inbuilt failure alert system within weewx for sending an advisory email in the event of upload failures for two or more hours instead of just logging the error as currently happens.  Food for thought perhaps??

I'd suggest that if your router goes down, any email sent from your weewx system won't get out to Internet either.

There are a variety of ways to check for system/network/app health depending on what you're trying to measure and where you're measuring from.    Adding a bunch of stuff to weewx, to me, isn't the wisest approach.

[Andrew Milner]

tx vince - u are, of course, 100% correct - in that example the email would more than likely be useless!!  doh!!

[Jarmo Seppänen]

Use the twitter extension perhaps? If the tweets end there must be a glitch somewhere...

[John Park]

Hi Thomas,

I'm using a WS 1400-IP and the interceptor driver. My issue has come about previously because of LAN issues or issues with the weatherstation receiver (connected to the LAN) unrelated to WeeWX. I've since enabled uploads to AWEKAS and enabled alerts there so hopefully the alerts work there as opposed to Wunderground's failed alerting system.

[vk3...@gmail.com]

It comes down to the source of the failure you want to monitor.

Using systemd will let you restart weewx if it stops running  but will not detect it looping or otherwise 'working' (as seen by the OS). It also won't detect a OS crash or power down.

if you just want the appearance of a file or data records etc. on some external computer (whether inside or outside your LAN) then you could set up something like an MQTT broker and have an app that subscribes tot he packets and does whatever you want if something is not received - a bit like a 'heartbeat monitor' app. However this would show you an error if anything between weewx and the subscriber was not working, not weewx specifically.

Susan

[uajqq]

I was recently wondering the same thing, but I didn't find any easy answer. I ended up creating an extension that sends a ping to healthchecks.io with every archive interval. That way, you can get an email, text message, whatever if weewx stops reporting. 

[uajqq]

Sorry, forgot to include the link: https://github.com/uajqq/weewx-healthchecks

[DaveStLou]

That's great @uajqq! Like OP, I've been looking for something like this since WeatherUnderground stopped sending alerts. Easy set up and I've got it running.