Requirements — Designing an IoT-Based PC Monitoring System

🎯 Overview

Before building the system, it is essential to define clear functional and non-functional requirements.

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📊 Functional Requirements

1. System Metrics Collection

• CPU usage
• Memory usage
• Disk I/O

2. Hardware Sensor Collection

• Temperature (CPU, GPU)
• Fan speed (RPM)
• Power consumption

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3. Multi-Rate Data Ingestion

Metric Type	Interval
Temperature / Fan	3 seconds
CPU / Memory / Disk	60 seconds

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4. Data Storage

• Time-series storage (InfluxDB)
• Aggregated storage (MySQL)

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5. Alert System

• Slack notification
• Threshold-based triggers
• Future: anomaly detection

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⚙️ Non-Functional Requirements

Performance

• Handle high-frequency ingestion
• Low latency alerting

Reliability

• No data loss
• Stable data pipeline

Scalability

• Support multi-PC architecture (future)

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🧠 Design Challenges

1. Windows Limitation

• No native API for fan/temp
• Requires external tools (HWiNFO)

2. Hybrid Data Pipeline

• Combining Telegraf + Python

3. Data Volume

• High-frequency sensor data → storage impact

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🏗️ Design Strategy

• Separate system metrics and sensor metrics
• Use different ingestion pipelines
• Normalize data before storage

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🚀 Next Step

In the next post, we will design the system architecture and data pipeline.

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