Lightning Radar

The Lightning Radar check warns when lightning strikes are detected near a location you monitor — a customer site, a branch office, or the device's own location. Each run listens to the live feed of the public Blitzortung.org community network and measures the distance between every reported strike and the monitored location: a strike within the warning radius turns the check to warning, one within the critical radius turns it critical. An approaching thunderstorm becomes visible in octoja while it is still on its way — time to check the UPS, finish backups, or postpone work on exposed hardware.

The check is network-based and needs no sensor hardware — any device whose agent can reach the feed can watch any location, independent of where the device sits. It runs on all agent platforms (Windows, Linux, and macOS, on x64 and ARM64 each) every minute by default and listens to the feed for 45 seconds per run.

Prerequisites

The check runs on the device itself, so the device needs outbound internet access. It reaches out to these destinations, all over TLS on port 443:

• ws1.blitzortung.org, ws7.blitzortung.org, ws8.blitzortung.org — the live strike feed, as a WebSocket connection. The check tries them in that order and stays with the first that answers.
• nominatim.openstreetmap.org — only when a location is configured as an address or place name, and only until the result is cached on the device.
• ipwho.is — only when Use device location is on, and at most once a day.

Steps

1. Go to Devices and open the device.
2. Click the Checks tab → Add Check → Lightning Radar.
3. Enter an address, place, or coordinates under Location, or enable Use device location.
4. Adjust Critical radius (km) and Warning radius (km) if needed.
5. Click Add Check.

Settings

With Use device location enabled, the location is determined automatically and the Location field is hidden. The Listen window appears once Show advanced options is enabled. If you set the critical radius larger than the warning radius, the check swaps the two.

Thresholds

Location and listen window

• The listen window samples the feed: with the default 45 seconds and the one-minute interval, about three quarters of each interval are observed. Increase the listen window to miss fewer strikes.
• The device location is determined from the public IP address with city-level accuracy and refreshed about once a day. With a VPN or a central internet breakout it can point far away from the physical site — configure a fixed location in that case.
• A configured address or place name is resolved once via OpenStreetMap and then cached on the device. To pin the location exactly, enter coordinates.

Results

Each run evaluates only its own listen window: once the storm moves on, the check returns to OK on the following runs by itself.

Lightning data comes from Blitzortung.org, a community network of volunteer-operated detector stations. Coverage and detection quality vary by region; octoja does not operate the network.

When the check can't run

These outcomes are about the check itself, not the weather. The first one raises a warning; the others fail the run and show as Error, usually a configuration or network problem.

What the check shows

Related articles

• Assign checks with config packages