A friend of mine recently had a solar panel system installed on his acreage. Besides being interesting because of the renewable/green aspect of the project, the system itself—from SolarEdge—is actually highly digital.

• A mobile app is used for commissioning the system.
• SolarEdge operates a cloud service which collects telemetry from the system and reports various performance metrics in a user-friendly dashboard.
• The inverters can connect to the IP network and provide a means to collect telemetry from them directly.

The last point interested me the most because any time a device exposes its data or a control connection, it means there's an opportunity to integrate it with other software. In this case, I wanted to create my own dashboard to display (near) real-time performance data for the system.

Whereas other blogs and articles on this topic describe how to monitor a single inverter system, this post will describe how I built a performance dashboard for a multi-inverter system.

I was recently playing around with the Traffic Mirroring feature in AWS. As a network geek, this is right up my alley because as some colleagues and I used to say, "the wire never lies!". Being able to pick packets off the wire for detailed inspection has saved the day many a time. Until Traffic Mirroring came along, it wasn't possible to do that in an Amazon VPC. Below are my notes and considerations for using this feature.

Cacti is a "complete network graphing solution" according to their website. It has also been a thorn in my side for a long time.

See what I did there? Thorn... because it's a cactus... never mind.

When Cacti is in a steady state-when I could get it to a steady state-it was good. Not great, because there was a lot of effort to get it into what I consider "steady state", but good. The rest of the time... thorny.

There are five major things that have driven me up the wall. In no particular order:

I had just lost the RAID array that hosts my ESXi data store. I didn't yet know that's what had happened, but with some investigation, some embarrassment, and a bit of swearing, I would find out that an oversight on my part three years ago would lead to this happening.