Ontario AQHI Exporter

A simple scraper and prometheus exporter for Ontario Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) data. This fetches data from the Air Quality Ontario website. A proper API would've been preferable, but you work with what ya got.

Configuration

Environment Var	Flags	Default	Description
LISTEN_ADDR	listen	127.0.0.1:8085	Network address for /metrics to listen on
SCRAPE_URL	scrape	http://www.airqualityontario.com/aqhi/index.php	Default URL to scrape from
CACHE_TTL	cache	300	Seconds to cache data

To see what stations are available, see the website.

Prometheus Configuration

The code block below would be sufficient to configure prometheus to scrape our /metrics endpoint. Readings are updated hourly, so there's no need to fetch faster than that.

scrape_configs:
  - job_name: 'ontario-aqhi-exporter'
    scrape_interval: 60m
    static_configs:
    - targets:
      - 127.0.0.1:8085

Usage

There's a few different ways you can interact with this software, below are a few examples.

Binary

./ontario-aqhi-exporter -station Kitchener -listen 127.0.0.1:8085 -scrape http://www.airqualityontario.com/aqhi/index.php

Docker

docker run -d --restart on-failure --name=ontario-aqhi-exporter -p 8085:8085 ztroop/ontario-aqhi-exporter

Docker Compose

version: '3.2'
services:
  ontario-aqhi-exporter:
    image: ontario-aqhi-exporter:latest
    build: .
    ports:
    - 8085:8085
    environment:
    - LISTEN_ADDR=0.0.0.0:8085
    - SCRAPE_URL=http://www.airqualityontario.com/aqhi/index.php
    - CACHE_TTL=300
    restart: unless-stopped

AQHI Level Descriptions

It's important to understand what the readings actually mean. Below is a snippet from Air Quality Ontario:

Health Risk	Air Quality Health Index	Description
Low	1 - 3	Ideal air quality for outdoor activities.
Moderate	4 - 6	No need to modify your usual outdoor activities unless you experience symptoms such as coughing and throat irritation.
High	7 - 10	Consider reducing or rescheduling strenuous activities outdoors if you experience symptoms such as coughing and throat irritation.
Very High	10+	Reduce or reschedule strenuous activities outdoors, especially if you experience symptoms such as coughing and throat irritation.

To see what is measured for each station, see the website.