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<h3>My Mac’s battery🔋 on Google Cloud Monitoring — send SMS if low 🪫</h3><blockquote>This article shows how you can easily inject a generic key/value into Google Cloud Monitoring and set up alerts on it. I use it to alert on disk space, and now also low battery!</blockquote>This morning I was in London, and I forgot my charger at home. With plenty of time but 🪫 little battery, I thought: hey! I need to have a way to predict when my battery is low! And I need to do it in a totally overkill way!<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*Yk6qFPAm6Y3Hwo5t" /><figcaption>Catching an early train from St Pancras to Stratford Intl then London City Airport.</figcaption></figure>My battery was at 42%, which seemed a subtle indication my idea was worth blogging. Googling around, I found <a href="https://www.iphonetricks.org/check-battery-health-on-mac-using-terminal/">an article</a> which gave me the tip on how to script my Mac’s battery (note this only works for a Macbook).Ugly code <a href="https://github.com/palladius/sakura/blob/master/bin/macbook-battery#L107-L150">here</a> (hey! I’m in an airport with no charger, do you want Unit tests too?!?)<iframe src="" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"><a href="https://medium.com/media/085df68699c21b7f54f45721065c2813/href">https://medium.com/media/085df68699c21b7f54f45721065c2813/href</a></iframe>I know, I call the same command 10 times and I could cache it. This is for the next iteration!The best part of this is, not only I get my battery life, it also gives me my battery durability — so when I need to change battery. Woohoo!There you go, let’s try it out, let me just remove the cable so you dont get a boring 100%.<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*VVFX7-q7pyNbZaFayRGLmg.png" /><figcaption>Battery level is 98%. Unfortunately 14% of my battery potential seems gone 😢</figcaption></figure>Battery is 98%, yay! Unfortunately seems like ~14% of my battery is gone. Luckily I don’t pay for its repair :)<h4>Step 2: push this metric to the ☁ ️(GCP)</h4>Now, I want a script which emits my metric from CLI. So I can say something like push-to-gcp &lt;METRIC_NAME&gt; &lt;METRIC_VALUE&gt;.I’ve coded my disk space a month ago, let me abstract it into some more reusable code (always Ruby): <a href="https://github.com/palladius/sakura/blob/master/bin/gcp-write-metric">palladius/sakura/gcp-write-metric</a> .<iframe src="" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"><a href="https://medium.com/media/a73541e14f99aefb609f8ca056ccf574/href">https://medium.com/media/a73541e14f99aefb609f8ca056ccf574/href</a></iframe>Ok! Now let’s try it out.<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/852/1*fFPP3gWU1mMpCUXLAyeBrQ.png" /><figcaption>Created the timeseries ‘prova’ (test in italian) with meaningful number 123! Wow!</figcaption></figure>Note you need to specify the project_id via ENV var (coming soon, the — project option, or better the project_id auto inferral from gcloud config).Let’s now glue the two scripts and upload the two Macbook info and see on the DevConsole:<iframe src="" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"><a href="https://medium.com/media/49258a59c0117f1018504c211725d963/href">https://medium.com/media/49258a59c0117f1018504c211725d963/href</a></iframe>This script requires a project_id in ARGV, then it does the work for you, knowing the fields which are useful from macbook-battery are coming from values 3 and 5 (yes, a JSON encoding/parsing would be less error prone!). Let’s call it:<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/925/1*CTX7IrQJgpI8qoFRDyA6Ug.png" /><figcaption>Meanwhile I went home, and launched this on my other M1 Mac. Always, boringly, attached to the current. Destined to an infinite life between 99 and 100%. Wait — this Mac, although charged, is on hold until 80%. Maybe cells optimization? I’m impressed.</figcaption></figure>Once everything works, you need to “productionize it”, which means setting up a Cron job (actually, <a href="https://www.launchd.info/">launchd</a>). I use. bash -lcto leverage PATH and other goodies from my .bashrcbut I hope you’re a better scripter and can make it work without that cumbersome import. Also make sure to add PATH correctly (I usually fail a few times before I get it right).<pre>$ crontab -e </pre><pre>[…] PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:~/git/sakura/bin/</pre><pre>3/5 * * * * bash -lc &#39;/Users/ricc/path-to/sakura/bin/gcp-write-mac-battery-values-on-project your-project-id&#39; […]</pre><h3>Step3: View metric and Create dashboard</h3>Let’s now head to the Metrics Explorer here and check a fake GCE metric:<ul><li>Go to <a href="https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/metrics-explorer?project=ric-cccwiki">https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/metrics-explorer</a></li><li>In “Select a metric” &gt; Type “Battery” and see the options fall from many to two:</li></ul><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/868/1*DlxGuBX4SYzrmN8EMIa38Q.png" /><figcaption>Here are my two metrics, CamelCased too!</figcaption></figure><ul><li>Select BatteryLife. This should take you to a nice dashboard (possibly empty if you just created this — be patient). Use the time control to go back in time or zoom until you get the desired view.</li><li>Since this signal comes from (possibly) multiple Macs, select “group by” -&gt; hostname. You could see something like this:</li></ul><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*yeP5TnvyAr-9uXYhOUvr4w.png" /><figcaption>See battery for last day. My Mac (3) at home is always plugged in, the one at work (42) goes to meeting rooms from time to time. To be honest i unplugged it twice just to get a nice screenshot — cheater!</figcaption></figure><ul><li>Now click “Save Chart” and enjoy.</li></ul>Bingo! You can have a dashboard where you see side by side both BatteryLife and BatteryHealth.<h4>Step4. Set alerting when battery is low</h4>Now let’s get an alert when the battery is below 14% (42 divided by π).<ul><li>Open <a href="https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/alerting?project=ric-cccwiki">https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/alerting</a></li><li>Click “+ Create Policy” (see <a href="https://gist.github.com/palladius/5c109015324fc6bffbfce2f58525760f">sample JSON output</a>)</li><li>“Select Metric” as above (type BatteryLife)</li><li>[optional] You may add a filter on the computer you care about: hostname = “my-favorite-mac”</li><li>Adjust TransformData parameters if you wish.</li><li>Click “Create Policy” -&gt; Configure Alert trigger</li><li>ConditionType: Threshold</li><li>Position: Below threshold</li><li>Threshold value: 14 (or value of your choice, like 20).</li><li>click Create Policy</li><li>Finally, configure your Notification Channels (<a href="https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/support/notification-options">documentation</a>), where I’ve set up previously my email and swiss phone:</li></ul><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/308/1*GaEH0EttI6W24HeWAVLisw.png" /><figcaption>What life would be without emojis?</figcaption></figure><ul><li>[optional] You can add some Policy User Labels. I enjoy using labels at all time (eg env=prod, scope=personal, ..).</li><li>[optional] You can fill in the Documentation like a Playbook. I always try to write something meaningful as part of SRE methodology (“no alert is good if it’s not actionable”). The action here is to attach your Mac to a power source.</li><li>Finally review the values and click Review Alert:</li></ul><figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*Fge8BQf73ReYJoUb5mdOMw.png" /></figure><h4>Conclusions</h4>In this brief article, we’ve seen how you can script a meaningful metric from your machine, and inject it to Cloud Monitoring from command line.It’s very easy to slice and dice these values (in this case aggregate by hostname), then dashboard and alert on them.<figure><img alt="" src="https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*clxCCRXccCBpxfET" /><figcaption>plug it to have battery or unplug it to see a nice graph?</figcaption></figure>The sky is just the limit now. You can do something silly like counting your Chrome Tabs and alert when they’re more than 42 with some silly messages like “A message from the Galaxy: restart Chrome!”<pre>brew install chrome-cli # only-once install PROJECT_ID=my-project-123 gcp-write-metric mac-chrome-cli-ntabs $(chrome-cli list tabs | wc -l)</pre>Note: in the code I use “gce_instance” when I should be really using “global” metric (<a href="https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/resources">docs</a>). I loved GCE Instance as it already has hostname and GCP zone baked in, but it’s incorrect (I tell GCP that’s a VM in the cloud, which is not). New code to support this is being developed in this amazing script:🌸 <a href="https://github.com/palladius/sakura/blob/master/bin/gcp-write-metric-done-well">gcp-write-metric-done-well</a><img src="https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=a1ccd70485fe" width="1" height="1" alt=""><hr><a href="https://medium.com/google-cloud/my-macs-battery-on-google-cloud-monitoring-with-sms-if-its-low-a1ccd70485fe">My Mac’s battery on Google Cloud Monitoring — with SMS if its low</a> was originally published in <a href="https://medium.com/google-cloud">Google Cloud - Community</a> on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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title: My Mac’s battery on Google Cloud Monitoring — with SMS if its low
url: https://medium.com/google-cloud/my-macs-battery-on-google-cloud-monitoring-with-sms-if-its-low-a1ccd70485fe?source=rss-b5293b96912f------2
author: Riccardo Carlesso
categories:
- google-cloud-platform
- gcp-app-dev
- alerts
- monitoring
- cloud-monitoring
published: 2022-11-09 16:53:21.000000000 Z
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content: "<h3>My Mac’s battery\U0001F50B on Google Cloud Monitoring — send SMS if
 low \U0001FAAB</h3><blockquote>This article shows how you can easily inject
 a generic key/value into Google Cloud Monitoring and set up alerts on it. I use
 it to alert on disk space, and now also low battery!</blockquote>This morning
 I was in London, and I forgot my charger at home. With plenty of time but \U0001FAAB
 little battery, I thought: hey! I need to have a way to predict when my battery
 is low! And I need to do it in a totally overkill way!<figure><img alt=\"\"
 src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*Yk6qFPAm6Y3Hwo5t\" /><figcaption>Catching
 an early train from St Pancras to Stratford Intl then London City Airport.</figcaption></figure>My
 battery was at 42%, which seemed a subtle indication my idea was
 worth blogging. Googling around, I found <a href=\"https://www.iphonetricks.org/check-battery-health-on-mac-using-terminal/\">an
 article</a> which gave me the tip on how to script my Mac’s battery (note this only
 works for a Macbook).Ugly code <a href=\"https://github.com/palladius/sakura/blob/master/bin/macbook-battery#L107-L150\">here</a>
 (hey! I’m in an airport with no charger, do you want Unit tests too?!?)<iframe
 src=\"\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><a href=\"https://medium.com/media/085df68699c21b7f54f45721065c2813/href\">https://medium.com/media/085df68699c21b7f54f45721065c2813/href</a></iframe>I
 know, I call the same command 10 times and I could cache it. This is for the next
 iteration!The best part of this is, not only I get my battery life, it also
 gives me my battery durability — so when I need to change battery. Woohoo!There
 you go, let’s try it out, let me just remove the cable so you dont get a boring 100%.<figure><img
 alt=\"\" src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*VVFX7-q7pyNbZaFayRGLmg.png\"
 /><figcaption>Battery level is 98%. Unfortunately 14% of my battery potential seems
 gone \U0001F622</figcaption></figure>Battery is 98%, yay! Unfortunately seems
 like ~14% of my battery is gone. Luckily I don’t pay for its repair :)<h4>Step
 2: push this metric to the ☁ ️(GCP)</h4>Now, I want a script which emits my metric
 from CLI. So I can say something like push-to-gcp &lt;METRIC_NAME&gt; &lt;METRIC_VALUE&gt;.I’ve
 coded my disk space a month ago, let me abstract it into some more reusable code
 (always Ruby): <a href=\"https://github.com/palladius/sakura/blob/master/bin/gcp-write-metric\">palladius/sakura/gcp-write-metric</a> .<iframe
 src=\"\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><a href=\"https://medium.com/media/a73541e14f99aefb609f8ca056ccf574/href\">https://medium.com/media/a73541e14f99aefb609f8ca056ccf574/href</a></iframe>Ok!
 Now let’s try it out.<figure><img alt=\"\" src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/852/1*fFPP3gWU1mMpCUXLAyeBrQ.png\"
 /><figcaption>Created the timeseries ‘prova’ (test in italian)
 with meaningful number 123! Wow!</figcaption></figure>Note you
 need to specify the project_id via ENV var (coming soon, the — project option, or
 better the project_id auto inferral from gcloud config).Let’s now glue the
 two scripts and upload the two Macbook info and see on the DevConsole:<iframe
 src=\"\" width=\"0\" height=\"0\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><a href=\"https://medium.com/media/49258a59c0117f1018504c211725d963/href\">https://medium.com/media/49258a59c0117f1018504c211725d963/href</a></iframe>This
 script requires a project_id in ARGV, then it does the work for you, knowing the
 fields which are useful from macbook-battery are coming from values 3 and 5 (yes,
 a JSON encoding/parsing would be less error prone!). Let’s call it:<figure><img
 alt=\"\" src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/925/1*CTX7IrQJgpI8qoFRDyA6Ug.png\"
 /><figcaption>Meanwhile I went home, and launched this on my other M1 Mac. Always,
 boringly, attached to the current. Destined to an infinite life between 99 and 100%.
 Wait — this Mac, although charged, is on hold until 80%. Maybe cells optimization?
 I’m impressed.</figcaption></figure>Once everything works, you need to “productionize
 it”, which means setting up a Cron job (actually, <a href=\"https://www.launchd.info/\">launchd</a>).
 I use. bash -lcto leverage PATH and other goodies from my .bashrcbut I hope you’re
 a better scripter and can make it work without that cumbersome import. Also make
 sure to add PATH correctly (I usually fail a few times before I get it right).<pre>$
 crontab -e </pre><pre>[…] PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:~/git/sakura/bin/</pre><pre>3/5
 * * * * bash -lc &#39;/Users/ricc/path-to/sakura/bin/gcp-write-mac-battery-values-on-project
 your-project-id&#39; […]</pre><h3>Step3: View metric and Create dashboard</h3>Let’s
 now head to the Metrics Explorer here and check a fake GCE metric:<ul><li>Go
 to <a href=\"https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/metrics-explorer?project=ric-cccwiki\">https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/metrics-explorer</a></li><li>In
 “Select a metric” &gt; Type “Battery” and see the options fall from many to two:</li></ul><figure><img
 alt=\"\" src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/868/1*DlxGuBX4SYzrmN8EMIa38Q.png\"
 /><figcaption>Here are my two metrics, CamelCased too!</figcaption></figure><ul><li>Select
 BatteryLife. This should take you to a nice dashboard (possibly
 empty if you just created this — be patient). Use the time control to go back in
 time or zoom until you get the desired view.</li><li>Since this signal comes from
 (possibly) multiple Macs, select “group by” -&gt; hostname. You
 could see something like this:</li></ul><figure><img alt=\"\" src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*yeP5TnvyAr-9uXYhOUvr4w.png\"
 /><figcaption>See battery for last day. My Mac (3) at home is always plugged in,
 the one at work (42) goes to meeting rooms from time to time. To be honest i unplugged
 it twice just to get a nice screenshot — cheater!</figcaption></figure><ul><li>Now
 click “Save Chart” and enjoy.</li></ul>Bingo! You can have a
 dashboard where you see side by side both BatteryLife and BatteryHealth.<h4>Step4.
 Set alerting when battery is low</h4>Now let’s get an alert when the battery
 is below 14% (42 divided by π).<ul><li>Open <a href=\"https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/alerting?project=ric-cccwiki\">https://console.cloud.google.com/monitoring/alerting</a></li><li>Click
 “+ Create Policy” (see <a href=\"https://gist.github.com/palladius/5c109015324fc6bffbfce2f58525760f\">sample
 JSON output</a>)</li><li>“Select Metric” as above (type BatteryLife)</li><li>[optional]
 You may add a filter on the computer you care about: hostname = “my-favorite-mac”</li><li>Adjust
 TransformData parameters if you wish.</li><li>Click “Create Policy”
 -&gt; Configure Alert trigger</li><li>ConditionType: Threshold</li><li>Position:
 Below threshold</li><li>Threshold value: 14 (or value of your choice,
 like 20).</li><li>click Create Policy</li><li>Finally, configure
 your Notification Channels (<a href=\"https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/support/notification-options\">documentation</a>),
 where I’ve set up previously my email and swiss phone:</li></ul><figure><img alt=\"\"
 src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/308/1*GaEH0EttI6W24HeWAVLisw.png\" /><figcaption>What
 life would be without emojis?</figcaption></figure><ul><li>[optional] You can add
 some Policy User Labels. I enjoy using labels at all time (eg env=prod,
 scope=personal, ..).</li><li>[optional] You can fill in the Documentation
 like a Playbook. I always try to write something meaningful as part of SRE
 methodology (“no alert is good if it’s not actionable”).
 The action here is to attach your Mac to a power source.</li><li>Finally review
 the values and click Review Alert:</li></ul><figure><img alt=\"\"
 src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/1*Fge8BQf73ReYJoUb5mdOMw.png\" /></figure><h4>Conclusions</h4>In
 this brief article, we’ve seen how you can script a meaningful metric from your
 machine, and inject it to Cloud Monitoring from command line.It’s very easy
 to slice and dice these values (in this case aggregate by hostname), then dashboard
 and alert on them.<figure><img alt=\"\" src=\"https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1024/0*clxCCRXccCBpxfET\"
 /><figcaption>plug it to have battery or unplug it to see a nice graph?</figcaption></figure>The
 sky is just the limit now. You can do something silly like counting your Chrome
 Tabs and alert when they’re more than 42 with some silly messages like “A message
 from the Galaxy: restart Chrome!”<pre>brew install chrome-cli # only-once
 install PROJECT_ID=my-project-123 gcp-write-metric mac-chrome-cli-ntabs $(chrome-cli
 list tabs | wc -l)</pre>Note: in the code I use “gce_instance” when I should
 be really using “global” metric (<a href=\"https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/api/resources\">docs</a>).
 I loved GCE Instance as it already has hostname and GCP zone baked in, but it’s
 incorrect (I tell GCP that’s a VM in the cloud, which is not). New code to support
 this is being developed in this amazing script:\U0001F338 <a href=\"https://github.com/palladius/sakura/blob/master/bin/gcp-write-metric-done-well\">gcp-write-metric-done-well</a><img
 src=\"https://medium.com/_/stat?event=post.clientViewed&referrerSource=full_rss&postId=a1ccd70485fe\"
 width=\"1\" height=\"1\" alt=\"\"><hr><a href=\"https://medium.com/google-cloud/my-macs-battery-on-google-cloud-monitoring-with-sms-if-its-low-a1ccd70485fe\">My
 Mac’s battery on Google Cloud Monitoring — with SMS if its low</a> was originally
 published in <a href=\"https://medium.com/google-cloud\">Google Cloud - Community</a>
 on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding
 to this story."

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