Monitoring WeeWX¶

Whether you run weewxd directly or in the background, weewxd emits messages about its status and generates reports. The following sections explain how to check the status of weewxd, locate and view the reports that it generates, and locate and view the log messages that it emits.

Status¶

If WeeWX was configured to run as a daemon, you can use the system's init tools to check the status.

systemdsysVBSD

# For Linux systems that use systemd, e.g., Debian, Redhat, SUSE
sudo systemctl status weewx

# For Linux systems that use SysV init, e.g., Slackware, Devuan, Puppy
sudo /etc/init.d/weewx status

# For BSD systems, e.g., FreeBSD, OpenBSD
sudo service weewx status

Another way to see whether WeeWX is running is to use a process monitoring tool such as ps, top, or htop. For example, the following command will tell you whether weewxd is running, and if it is, you will see the additional information including process identifier (PID), memory used, and how long it has been running.

ps aux | grep weewxd

Reports¶

When it is running properly, WeeWX will generate reports, typically every five minutes. The reports are not (re)generated until data have been received and accumulated, so it could be a few minutes before you see a report or a change to a report.

The location of the reports depends on the operating system and how WeeWX was installed. See HTML_ROOT in the Where to find things section.

If everything is working, the report directory will contain a bunch of HTML and PNG files. Some of these will be updated each archive interval, others will be updated less frequently, such as each day or week.

You can view the reports directly with a web browser on the computer that is running WeeWX. If the computer has no GUI, consider running a web server or pushing the reports to a computer that has a web server. These options are explained in the section Web server integration.

Depending on the configuration, if WeeWX cannot get data from the sensors, then it will probably not generate or update any reports. So if you do not see reports, or the reports are not changing, check the log!

Log messages¶

In the default configuration, messages from WeeWX go to the system logging facility.

The following sections show how to view WeeWX log messages on systems that use syslog and systemd-journald logging facilities. See the wiki article How to view the log for more details.

See the wiki article How to configure logging for information and examples about how to configure WeeWX logging.

The `syslog` logging facility¶

On traditional systems, the system logging facility puts the WeeWX messages into a file, along with other messages from the system. The location of the system log file varies, but it is typically /var/log/syslog or /var/log/messages.

You can view the messages using standard tools such as tail, head, more, less, and grep, although the use of sudo may be necessary (the system logs on most modern systems are readable only to administrative users).

For example, to see only the messages from weewxd:

sudo grep weewxd /var/log/syslog

To see only the latest 40 messages from weewxd:

sudo grep weewxd /var/log/syslog | tail -40

To see messages as they come into the log in real time (hit ctrl-c to stop):

sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog

The `systemd-journald` logging facility¶

Some systems with systemd use only systemd-journald as the system logging facility. On these systems, you will have to use the tool journalctl to view messages from WeeWX. In what follows, depending on your system, you may or may not need sudo.

For example, to see only the messages from weewxd:

sudo journalctl -u weewx

To see only the latest 40 messages from weewxd:

sudo journalctl -u weewx --lines 40

To see messages as they come into the log in real time:

sudo journalctl -u weewx -f

Logging on macOS¶

Unfortunately, with the introduction of macOS Monterey (12.x), the Python logging handler SysLogHandler, which is used by WeeWX, does not work¹. Indeed, the only handlers in the Python logging facility that work with macOS 12.x or later are standalone handlers that log to files.

Fortunately, there is a simple workaround. Put this at the bottom of your weewx.conf configuration file:

[Logging]

    [[root]]
        handlers = timed_rotate,

    [[handlers]]
        [[[timed_rotate]]]
            level = DEBUG
            formatter = verbose
            class = logging.handlers.TimedRotatingFileHandler
            filename = log/{process_name}.log
            when = midnight
            backupCount = 7

This makes messages from the WeeWX application weewxd go to the file ~/weewx-data/log/weewxd.log instead of the system logger. Messages from weectl will go to ~/weewx-data/log/weectl.log.

For an explanation of what all these lines mean, see the wiki article on WeeWX logging.

See Python issue #91070. ↩