Creating a virtual device

Configuration
1

I’m still somewhat new to Home-assistant so apologies if this question doesn’t entirely make sense.

I have some automation jobs that run elsewhere on my network (backups, that kind of thing) and I’d like to pull the results of that data into Home-assistant, so I have a central place to monitor things and alert when there are issues.

I’ve set up some scripts which call the event REST endpoint and I can use those to trigger events, but I’d quite like to manage it a bit more cleverly. So my event will send some data like “duration”, “number of files backed up”, “total files in backup” that kind of thing. Is there a relatively sensible way to wrap those up in something in HomeAssistant which looks like a Device with a number of entities on it representing each of those values? I could then graph it, make decisions on it?

I have googled a bit and couldn’t find anything, but apologies in advance if I missed something obvious!

2

I’d say put all the values in attributes of the sensor.
That’s the best way to keep values together

3

MQTT

4

After an hour or so playing with MQTT I think this is a good option for me.

I’m using the MQTTX CLI which seems very slow to connect to the broker, is that normal? Given MQTTX is supposed to be super lightweight I kind of assumed connection would be fast!

Thanks both of you for the hints! I’ve had fun learning a bit about MQTT too :slight_smile:

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