Dear List

I am using Bricks and Bricklets in distributed hardware in many remote locations. Usually, the bricklets are accessed by software running locally at the remote locations.

What is missing from my side, is a monitoring-tool, which checks the availability and health of the individual bricklets at the locations. To have an information about the health and availability of the bricks and bricklets, I am thinking to implement a piece of software running as service, e.g. TinkerforgeWatcher.

The TinkerforgeWatcher will have a configuration-file containing a list of all bricks and bricklets to be monitor at the specific location. Using a monitoring-service, like Prometheus, the TinkerforgeWatcher will submit in a defined rate the health of all bricklets.

Basically, it will submit an OK or a NOK for each bricklet.

Now the question:

• What kind of function would you use to check the health of a bricklet?

Currently, I have the impression, that *.get_spitfp_error_count() would be the most suitable function to have a first impression about the health of a bricklet.

Looking forward to any suggestions.

Cheers. Yvo

This is what I do: I keep a registry of all Tinkerforge devices in a YAML file:

---
devices:
  21LQ:
    inventory:
      name: GPS Bricklet 3.0
      identifier: 2171
      first seen: 2026-01-29 08:21:30 UTC
      last seen: 2026-01-29 08:21:30 UTC
      firmware: 2.0.0
      connected: YwJ
      position: B
      host: esp1.local
      port: 4223
    settings:
      fix_led_config: 1
      status_led_config: 0
# 331 Lines skipped for brevity
  RvX:
    inventory:
      name: Outdoor Weather Bricklet
      identifier: 288
      first seen: 2022-06-06 13:05:32 UTC
      last seen: 2026-01-28 08:14:32 UTC
      firmware: 2.0.4
      connected: S2c
      position: c
      host: p3.local
      port: 4223
    settings:
      status_led_config: 0
      sensormap:
        74: inside
        61: outside
        223: fridge
# Et cetera...

A little script regularly connects to all hosts, finds all devices through discovery, and updates the registry. Newly found devices automatically get added. Devices that stopped responding will have a stale 'last seen' value. YAML file sits in a Git repo.