Weather rock uncovering

 After putting off finishing the rest of the environmental or weather readings from the nearest airport into a Zabbix suite long enough, I standardized the newest release level 7.4 using FreeBSD.

You can't use the Zabbix send tool for random text without it going somewhere structured so I first set up the variables, naming with Ambient and tagging with Environment. A typical METAR weather file pull looks like:

Baltimore / Martin, MD, United States (KMTN) 39-20N 076-25W
Jun 11, 2022 - 06:54 PM EDT / 2022.06.11 2254 UTC
Wind: Calm:0
Visibility: 10 mile(s):0
Sky conditions: partly cloudy
Temperature: 69 F (21 C)
Dew Point: 59 F (15 C)
Relative Humidity: 68%
Pressure (altimeter): 29.96 in. Hg (1014 hPa)
ob: KMTN 112254Z 00000KT 10SM SCT180 21/15 A2996
cycle: 23

In hindsight, I erred not adding a separator on the pressure column names. Visibility is reported only in miles; adding Km could be a derived field in Zabbix.

The command line I used is, ish:

export ZABBIX_SEND="zabbix_sender -vv -z "${ZABBIX_SERV}" -p 10051 -s "${ZABBIX_HOST}" -k "

Each key is from a row and column in the weather dump, neatly prefixed line-by-line and at most 2 or 3 datapoints per row. I have wind rose in text style, but not "sky conditions"

Wind: from the S (190 degrees) at 7 MPH (6 KT):0

The early-2026 cold snap is quite evident, over days, looking back at a 7.0 level Zabbix server.

The shell script has a bunch of grep/sed/awk when Perl or whatever would be slicker. This just grew piece by piece. We want it to run for instance:

  zabbix_sender -vv -z 127.0.0.1 -p 10051 -s place -k  "enviro[Temperature.Celsius]" -o  8

# echo C

grep  "^Temperature: "           $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//" -e "s/)//"   | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Temperature.Celsius\]\"    -o ", $4}'

# echo F

grep  "^Temperature: "           $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//" -e "s/)//"   | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Temperature.Fahrenheit\]\" -o ", $2}'

# echo dew

grep  "^Dew Point: "             $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//" -e "s/)//"   | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[DewPoint.Fahrenheit\]\"    -o " $3}'

grep  "^Dew Point: "             $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//" -e "s/)//"   | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[DewPoint.Celsius\]\"    -o " $5}'

# echo hum

grep  "^Relative Humidity: "     $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/%//"              | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Humidity\]\"               -o ", $3}'

grep  "^Pressure (altimeter): "  $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//" -e "s/)//"   | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[PressureHG\]\"             -o ", $3}'

grep  "^Pressure (altimeter): "  $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//g" -e "s/)//g" | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[PressurePA\]\"  -o ", $6}'

grep  "^Visibility: " $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//g" -e "s/)//g" | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Visibility]\" -o ", $2}'

grep  "^Wind: " $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//g" -e "s/)//g" | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Wind.Rose\]\"        -o ", $4}'

grep  "^Wind: " $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//g" -e "s/)//g" | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Wind.Direction\]\"   -o ", $5}'

grep  "^Wind: " $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//g" -e "s/)//g" | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Wind.Speed\]\"    -o ", $8}'

# eof

grep  "^ob" $DATAFILE  | sed -e "s/(//g" -e "s/)//g" | awk -v zs="$ZABBIX_SEND" '{print zs, "\"enviro\[Metar\]\" -o \"" substr($0,5,99) "\""  }'

 

After collecting wind direction for a few hours, the results look as expected.

Timestamp	Value
2026-04-27 05:21:01 PM	S
2026-04-27 04:21:01 PM	S
2026-04-27 03:21:01 PM	S
2026-04-27 02:21:01 PM	S
2026-04-27 01:21:01 PM	S
2026-04-27 12:21:01 PM	S
2026-04-27 11:21:01 AM	S
2026-04-27 03:21:01 AM	NNW
2026-04-26 10:21:01 PM	SE
2026-04-26 07:21:01 PM	ESE
2026-04-26 06:21:01 PM	ESE