Is there any off-the-shelf watchdog known, which is operated via GPIO, able to switch input power to the router ?
In a large fleet of remote routers, from time to time I have various issues of different kind, which usually can be solved via power cycle. Manual intervention could be avoided in these cases using such a watchdog.
Before you consider something like that, have you actually verified that your routers hard-crash? Because if they don't, you could just use a software-watchdog to have them automatically reboot, if needed.
See e.g. https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/advanced/watchcat
No hard-crash. But a "hanging" LTE-modem, for example. Either power-cycling the modem via GPIO solves the problem, or power cycle of the router. Softboot does not help. This is the most frequent problem, but there are other, usually harware-related. When you have a large fleet (> 1000) of identical routers, its only a question of statistics, how often such problems show up a day.
Well, ok. I am not aware of any good premade solutions for this, but you could e.g. buy WiFi-enabled wall-sockets that can be flashed with Tasmota and then use them to power-cycle those routers.
Tasmota has a functionality called rules, whereby you can set a watchdog that will toggle the relay off and back on, if it can't ping the router for some customizable amount of time. The router can also tell the Tasmota-device to power-cycle the router via a custom script, if the router is still working and just can't connect via the LTE-modem.
I typically just manually flash devices with Tasmota, but with so many routers, you'd probably want something with it pre-flashed. Alas, there are very few vendors who sell such; I am only aware of one. I did buy a bunch of the ones in the following link, though, and they're working great, even if they're a tad expensive: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001230982267.html?spm=a2g0o.order_list.0.0.69361802I3xTJF
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Thanx a lot. Looks suitable, will check in detail.