RTL 433 Prometheus Exporter

This repository contains a prometheus exporter for rtl_433, a tool for receiving data from many different types of radio sensors.

Prerequisites

The following need to be installed and working first:

• rtl_433
• python3

Setup

The following will set up rtl_433_exporter to run via systemd:

• Clone this repo
• Run pip install -r requirements.txt
• Copy rtl_433_exporter.py to /usr/local/bin
• Create a config file in /usr/local/etc/rtl_433_exporter_config.toml
• Copy rtl_433_exporter.service to /etc/systemd/system
• Run systemctl daemon-reload
• Run systemctl enable rtl_433_exporter.service
• Run systemctl start rtl_433_exporter.service

Config

The configuration file format is TOML, and the default path to the config file is config.toml in the same directory as rtl_433_exporter.py itself.

[metric_descriptions]
foo = "Example metric description"

This section is for if your device returns a metric that isn't known by rtl_433_exporter, and allows you to add a friendly description for the metric that is included in the prometheus output. If you don't do this, the metric name itself is used as the friendly description.

[locations]
# Model,ID,Channel = Location
"Acurite-Rain899,1234,0" = "Outside"

This section lets you map a device to a specific location (or other friendly name for the device). You specify the model, ID and channel separated by commas, and the value will be set as the 'location' prometheus label.

prometheus_port = 9550

You can change the port used for the exporter by specifying it in the configuration file similar to above.

Metric names

Metrics names are identical to those returned by rtl_433 -F json, but with rtl_433_ prepended to the name. You can run rtl_433 manually to discover what they are. However, the following are some common metrics you might see:

• rtl_433_battery_ok - Battery status of a device
• rtl_433_rain_mm - The total amount of rainfall for a rain meter

There are also two additional metrics added by the exporter:

• rtl_433_timestamp_seconds - the unix timestamp of the time when we last received a packet for a given device.
• rtl_433_packets_received - A count of the total number of packets received for a given device.

All metrics have 4 labels attached to them:

• model - The model of the device as returned by rtl_433
• id - The id of the device as returned by rtl_433
• channel - The channel of the device as returned by rtl_433
• location - A 'friendly' name for a device that you can set in the configuration file based on model,id,channel. If you don't set a friendly name, this label is left blank.

Example prometheus configuration

  - job_name: static_exporters
    static_configs:
      - targets:
        - meters.example.com:9550

Similar tools

• rtl_433_prometheus - the original inspiration for this project. The main difference between the two is that rtl_433_exporter will provide metrics for anything rtl_433 gives you and so will work with more than humidity and temperature sensors. However, rtl_433_exporter isn't quite a drop in replacement, as some of the metrics names are changed to match what rtl_433 returns.