Home Assistant in the Enterprise

Like many of us in the HA community. I’m an IT Professional by day and Home Automation tinker-er by night. Recently I was presented with project that would involve interfaces with a third party REST API to grab some metrics and store/graph them later and also have some buttons for some simple API level control. In the past i’ve used Cacti for this and even some InfluxDB and Grafana, but historically, setting those solutions up required a ton of development and trial and error at times.

Then it occurred to me: Home Assistant has a ton of non-manufacture specific options for components. From the Command Line Sensor, File sensor, Command Line switch, SNMP, REST switch and sensor. Tons of stuff. Who has thought about using Home Assistant in the Enterprise? So much enterprise style control (via APIs) and metrics logging as well as some simple alerting could be done using Home Assistant. Not to mention Enterprise automation using the existing workflow. It seems so simple to say “If this command line sensor returns X, execute this HA script that would execute some command line commands”. I’m not saying HA should replace systems like Cacti, Nagios or Zabbix. I don’t think the History component can really do what Cacti does, But When I thought about prototyping a website for use by the help desk to shoot off API commands to a web service to help end users along with graphing some usage metrics, sure I could spin something up in PHP and make it look pretty using Bootstrap or React, but it would be so much quicker to spin something up in YAML with Home Assistant and get a decently organized interface that is intuitive and easy to use with completely minimal effort.

Now where Home Assistant falls short in this concept is in multi-user authentication (LDAP/AD) and possible groups structure. If one were to do this, it would be really handy to not only tie it into Active Directory for authentication, but to also assign users access to views and groups based on defined group of users. At least I’m not aware (I haven’t looked into it yet) if this is possible

What is the community’s thought on this? Do you agree that Home Assistant could be useful in the enterprise from a simple control, automation, and metrics standpoint? Or does this sound crazy and should I get back to work? :slight_smile:

Edit: To clarify, I’m not thinking of controlling lighting and other industrial building automation through HA, while also another interesting idea. I’m mainly curious about the feasibility of using Home Assistant’s framework, platform, and architecture for IT related control and automation.

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I plan on using HA at work to automate a measurement rig. Will be controlling a few stages over TCP and triggering a camera. Beats using wxPython to create a gui.!

I think home assistant has quite some concepts in common with runbook automations.
Currently I am trying to build chatops for our servicedesk (with lita.io and api.ai) and the backend for the commands will probably be home assistant :slight_smile: LDAP or Active Directory Authentication would be cool, but I guess it won’t be easy to ensure proper Role-based access control to the components or views.

do you guys know nodered? A nodejs based visual programming tool with loads of components - so called “nodes”.
It sounds like it might be what you’re looking for.