New Relic Serves Up Raspberry Pi Beacons to Celebrate Pi Day

written by nick floyd

we love monitoring things here at new relic. we use the information that we gather about our applications every day to make them better. so in honor of pi day the new relic .net team wondered how we could be even more precise this year, given that this year it falls on 3.14.15!

we rifled through our drawers and pulled out a jumbled collection of silicon and wires, which we used to create our new raspberry beacons !

the intent of this project was to build a simple, fun, and inexpensive alerting beacon using open source technologies. these beacons can be connected to any type of service and be used as a visual notification that “something” is happening.

this beacon is great for when you need a visual alert or warning, such as when your latest build has hit production, when a specific application has crossed some threshold, or when you’ve turned your devices to “silent” and your site goes down.

to build these beacons, we used some great hardware ( raspberry pi a+ , ledborg , and more) as well as software ( node.js and pi-gpio ) in order to make something that can be useful and really extensible.

you can get started on your own beacon right away by heading over to the project repository on github.

“monitor all the things…”