Collecting Unifi controller data with collectd

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Written by Rebecca Peck · 1 minute read

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As you can tell from the last few posts, I’ve been having a lot of fun with collectd and instrumenting my systems. But I had one glaring hole until recently: my Ubiquti Unifi AP access points. Well no longer!

I came across an NPM package that could easily extract data from the Unifi controller software. From there, it was trivially easy to implement a script that harvests data from the controller and passes is along to collectd.

Thus, collectd-unifi was born.

Getting started with it is pretty easy. Just clone the repo, install the NPM dependencies and edit the config file. Once you have the script working, you can use the Exec plugin in collectd to run the script:

LoadPlugin exec
<Plugin "exec">
    Interval 60
    Exec "daemon:daemon" "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/opt/collectd-unifi/unifi.js"
</Plugin>

Restart collectd and you should now have Unifi data flowing.

An image of Rebecca Peck

About the Author

Hi, I'm Rebecca Peck (she/her)! I'm a parent, blogger and software developer. I'm into bike riding, photography, writing, making wine, listening to history podcasts, 3D printing, home automation, being a complete and hopeless Apple/Star Trek/Disney fangirl, and anything involving airplanes, trains and model trains. I am based in Fort Collins, Colorado. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Options Have Meanings, or, How I Made an rsync Seven Times Faster
The 2017 Total Solar Eclipse

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