FritzBox-monitor

Monitor FritzBox metrics via a telegraf/influxdb/grafana stack that reads data from TR-064

What you get....

• Includes current DSL rates, possible line rates (over time)
• Traffic on DSL line and LAN port (seems to only register LAN1 in TR-064)
• Packets per second on WLAN, LAN and DSL
• Clients associated in WLAN2.4 / WLAN 5 & WLAN guest
• DECT clients, active VOIP numbers

Details

• I decided that I want to parse the Fritzbox info via a single telegraf input.
• Consequently, the checkfritz.py returns a json which can be easily disgested as array

Background

I have a FritzBox 7490 at home, which is connected to a vDSL 100/40 line - I was wondering regarding my traffic patterns, as well as things like connected WiFi clients, DSL line capacity and so on.

My use case

The special thing to mention is:

• TR-064 is only accessible from the LAN (for good reasons, in terms of security)
• My monitoring stack of influxDB etc runs on my server in Frankfurt - so the metrics need to get there safely and securely.
• Another open port on my server, e.g. for InfluxDB etc was not deemed acceptable
• For security considerations, I prefer a "direct pull" of metrics, e.g. by telegraf
• So, the actual monitoring collector needs from a decoy host in the LAN, namely my diskstation or one of the raspis
• I did not want to run an ssh command for every value
• LAN hosts can be securely / directly accessed by IPv6, and thanks to DNS updates, also carry AAAA entries.

References

I started looking around, and found a good number of projects and descriptions, on how to do it...

• https://github.com/kbr/fritzconnection
• https://github.com/jhubig/FritzBoxShell
• https://github.com/fetzerch/fritzcollectd

All of those needed quite some extra work, or did not fit my use case directly... FritzBoxShell did not completely fetch all the information available, as described by https://avm.de/service/schnittstellen/, and the scripts provided with fritzconnection did need modification as well, the collectd plugin (based on FritzConnection) requires an collectd somewhere in LAN - and an accessible sink.

Installation

Pre-requisites

FritzBox

• Have a recent FritzOS - I have tested with FRITZ!OS 07.19 on a FritzBox 7490
• Enable TR-064 on your fritzbox, and add a dedicated monitoring user (see: https://www.schlaue-huette.de/apis-co/fritz-tr064/ )
• Check from LAN, whether you can access http://fritz.box:49000/tr64desc.xml

Diskstation extras

• Have a Python 3 installation (install Python package) and fritzconnection running (this is quite a task):
  • Install opkg as your package manager, probably best via EasyBootstrapInstaller (see: https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/127148 )
  • Have "python3-pip" and "python3-lxml" (to tackle the TR-064 SOAP) ready and installed (either installed via opkg, or via pip-bootstrap - have fun getting lxml running on the diskstation without opkg... as the headers are missing)
  • Make sure you have the fritzconnection module: pip install fritzconnections
• Create a monitoring user via web-ui, have this one be an admin user (otherwise ssh-login does not work)
• Add your monitoring servers telegraf ssh key to ~monitoring/.ssh/authorized_keys

Monitoring server (in the internet)

• Have a recent telegraf installation running
• Have the local output configured, e.g. [[outputs.influxdb]]
• Have grafana ready, to be able to read from said output
  • Install the carpet-plot panel, to get fancy traffic analysis (bucket per time of day on y-axis, and day at x-axis, color is the intensity) https://grafana.com/grafana/plugins/petrslavotinek-carpetplot-panel
• Configure telegraf to be able to ssh out with key-auth
  • Create an ssh-key for ~telegraf , probably in /etc/telegraf/.ssh/id_rsa without passphrase, so it can be called from telegraf directly.
  • Check whether telegraf can log in to your diskstation (in the LAN) via keyauth

Actual installation

• Copy checkfritz.py to your decoy host
  • Adjust credentials
  • Check it is executable & works: Log in to decoy host as the user, and ./checkfritz.py
• Integrate telegraf-fritzbox.conf into server grafana installation
  • Test the config: telegraf --filter inputs.exec --test
  • Restart grafana, and start collecting data
• Add grafana-fritzbox-dashboard.json to your server grafana installation