Monitoring your network for connectivity and power outages can be very useful, especially when trying to isolate or prevent issues. While there are plenty of network monitoring applications available for PCs, this project was developed with the Raspberry Pi in mind.
Created by Butean Fabian (opens in new tab) and shared on YouTube (opens in new tab)recently, the Pi-based monitoring system uses a custom Python package, called Outage Detector, to continuously monitor the network.
Any events of internet or power outage are logged on the Pi. When power and internet is restored, the application can send a notification to the user, as well as information on how much downtime was suffered.
In the video shared by Fabian, he uses a Raspberry Pi 4. However, this is a very low resource-intensive project and you could easily swap the Pi 4 out for a Pi Zero W. Overall, the project appears to have low power consumption and won't interfere with other applications if restarted.
The project runs on the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) and requires Python 3. You can have the monitor send notifications through either Pushbullet (opens in new tab) or email. There is no iOS client support for Pushbullet, making email the only option for iPhone users.
If you want to check out this project first-hand, you're in luck. Fabian was nice enough to share all his code for Outage Detector (opens in new tab) on PyPI, so you can recreate it yourself. Be sure to follow him on YouTube (opens in new tab) for more projects and future updates.
