Re: Need a bit of Raspberry Pi action
We do support a large number of appliances in really remote (to us, as behind doors with gun-carrying guards around them, who always - and I really mean always - look annoyed) places.
Of course they are Linux based.
Of course they shit themselves from time to time (TBH basically only with hardware faults)
Our "Fleet Management" is a device/software/version-personalized script on the appliance that phones home every so-and-so telling e.g. "I am fine" or "I'd rather have a new disk in slot 3" (they carry a largish cache each, but no genuinly original data apart from the system-generated config). And that "phone home box" is of course a cluster and of course keeps track of missed calls.
The "dashboard" is ugly as hell, but nobody ever bothered to have the designers put a lick of paint on something, where the "show last 100 events with lever warning or worse" logtable is the page that gets 99% of the hits.
If such an event occurs from a not-yet signalled device-id, a list of e-mail addresses will be pinged once an hour until they log in and display details for this device id.
If they log a warning+ event or if ordered to do so when phoning home, they will also open a reverse SSH tunnel to the watchdog server, so that the admins can log in.
The whole setup took less than 2 days to create and hasn't failed us in many thousands of deviceyears.
And: It is no subscription, belongs to us, isn't tied into some "cloud service" and moving it is a DNS record away.
And: it is ISO123456789-certified to exactly 125ml of Pinot Grigio