Recently I have started consolidating metrics for all my machines into Graphite. I keep a couple of Raspberry Pis around the house and one of them runs OpenELEC, my favourite way for running XBMC on Raspberry Pi.

This is a quick guide on how to monitor uptime and load average on OpenELEC and send it to Graphite.

Before you start, make sure your time is accurate, since Graphite relies on timestamps for storing the information:

ntpdate ntp.lth.se

OpenELEC uses BusyBox and does not come with a package manager. Fortunately screen is quite portable and it is simple to manually extract it from Raspbians packages and drop in the binaries.

Either copy the files from an existing Raspbian system or use the commands below on a Debian based system to extract the files.

Both screen and the script is going to run out of /storage/

Grab a copy of screen

wget http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/s/screen/screen_4.1.0~20120320gitdb59704-9_armhf.deb
mkdir screen-arm
dpkg -x screen_4.1.0~20120320gitdb59704-9_armhf.deb screen-arm
scp screen-arm/usr/bin/screen openelec:/storage/.

Grab a copy of libpam and libaudit

wget http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/p/pam/libpam0g_1.1.8-2_armhf.deb
mkdir libpam
dpkg -x libpam0g_1.1.8-2_armhf.deb libpam
scp libpam/lib/arm-linux-gnueabihf/libpam.so.0.83.1 openelec:/storage/libpam.so.0
mkdir libaudit
wget http://mirrordirector.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/a/audit/libaudit0_1.7.18-1.1_armhf.deb
dpkg -x libaudit0_1.7.18-1.1_armhf.deb libaudit
scp libaudit/lib/libaudit.so.0.0.0 tv:/storage/libaudit.so.0 openelec:/storage/libaudit.so.1

Create a wrapper for screen

Now that all files are in place in /storage/. Create screen.sh

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/storage:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}"
./screen "$@"

Create the monitoring script

Create stats.sh:

Start and detach screen

./screen.sh ./stats.sh

Detach with CTRL + A + D.

Watch the results in Graphite