Best way to offload http calls to Appdaemon?

Hello, I have a question about setting up website monitoring using HA and appdaemon.

First, I have used Nagios/Zabbix for years so I really just want something quick and dirty. Also, I work from home 99% and have access to HA all the time.

Basically I would like to group the sites into critical, medium and sobeit - respectively polling at 3, 15 and 30 minute intervals…with appropriate notifications. I would like to see the status of everything in Home Assistant. I’m not sure which cards to use, considering there may be 20-25 websites displayed.

Right now the calls to the websites (maybe 10 for now) are binary_sensors using curl and the command_line platform in HA. Needless to say, HA is taking longer and longer to reboot, so I would like to offload these http(s) calls to appdaemon. I also would like HA to trigger the 3,15,30 minute events so I can turn the automation off (with all the others in HA) in case something goes awry.

The last thing is I would like to keep ONE list of the URLs being called, so that has to be done in HA since that is where I am displaying their statuses. In other words, if I add/remove a site, I don’t want to have to update a list in both appdaemon and HA.

  • I thought about using the rest binary_sensor platform, and make the call in appdaemon using the “resource” attribute which contains the url. But can I ‘set’ the state of the binary sensor afterwards? Would this be a good approach? Is there an API call in appdaemon similar to curl?

  • I also thought of using an input_boolean but that leaves me with the burden of maintaining a separate list of urls, all of which I would have to pass in as parameters into appdaemon, somehow.

Is there another way of doing this?

Any insight would be appreciated.

You can dynamically create home assistant sensors in appdaemon.
I would periodically iterate through a list and do the necessary things.
Afterwards you can use the “auto-entities” card to display the sensors automatically in lovelace. https://github.com/thomasloven/lovelace-auto-entities