Home assistant monitoring

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1

Hi there,

This weekend I tried to start the monitoring task of my HA installation.
I managed to have it done using uptimerobot service (the free version), as it basically keeps pinging my HA web server and checking if the front end is alive. It is working, but there are 2 things I dont like on this approach.

  1. it is the only service I have opened in my firewall, everything else only gets in by VPN client. So port forwarding is not something I like, at all.
  2. I am not 100% that this is an effective way to monitor the HA itself, as I assume that at some point, the HA might crash but leave the web interface up and running.

I was thinking on a solution like a watchdog (normally used in HW development) to ensure that HA is alive. Basically I could have HA to trigger a reset switch in a server (could be a RPi or a tiny AWS server - which is also free). the server basically would have a countdown timer, and everything it got interrupted by the trigger, it will start over again (basic watchdog functionality) once it reaches 0, it would trigger a IFTTT Maker script and I would get a message on my phone.

My question is: overall this is a good idea? or am I over engineering something simple? are you aware of any solution like that?

any comments?

thanks!

Luis

2

Sounds sort of like a “Dead Man’s Switch”. An interesting approach; the only problem I could see is that the added steps in communication - HA to Switch, Switch to IFTTT, IFTTT to phone could be interrupted at any one point and cause the others to fail.

But I think communication failure is a risk in any monitoring scenario so I think you may be onto something.

3

Another topic about the saame issue:

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4

Wouldn’t just using a system-D service to monitor HA be enough?

5

Or you could do like me and run the free version of Paessler PRTG to monitor everything in my network and trigger emails or script actions if something goes down. 100 sensors in the free version covers pretty much everything from my firewall, my switch to my servers in my home network. :slight_smile:

https://www.paessler.com/prtg/download

P.S. this requires you to have a Windows machine in your environment to run the probe.

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6

How about using the watchdog service of the system running home-assistant? the RPI has one and i guess most embedded systems have a watchdog…

7

Did any use PRTG integrated in HA?

8

Also interested on monitoring HA in PRTG and show PRTG faults on HA.
Anyone doing this?

9

After i put my unify controller in hassio, i monitor everything directly in hassio.
The more advanced alerts are not supported, but ping for me is ok.

10

I’ve managed to use REST api from PRTG to get alerts in HA, not perfect, but works great.

11

Can you please share how you did that?

I want to sent PRTG notifications from HA to Alexa via node-red

12

Hello,

I’ve created a sensor that get’s the information from PRTG server like this:

- platform: scrape
  resource: http://PRTG_SERVER/api/gettreenodestats.xml?username=USER&password=PASS
  select: "downsens"
  verify_ssl: False
  name: PRTG Down Sensors

Here you can get the number of down sensors, you can access with a web browser and check all available data (total sensors, warn sensors, etc).
Then with an automation when the number changes I trigger to send a message in Telegram…

I would like to get the name of the sensor that is down, but still not been succeed…
If anyone has a better way to do this I’ll appreciate sharing…

JS

13

Thanks for sharing this!

I will try it.

14

Hi,

with this rest sensor you are able to get details from PRTG for a single sensor and you can also sent it to Alexa.
Works fine.
But how you can handle this for all sensor without create multiple rest sensors?

- platform: rest
resource: https://{PRTG FQDN/IP}/api/getsensordetails.json?{PRTG SENSOR ID}&name=status&username={PRTG UN}&password={PRTG USER HASH}
name: "PRTG"
value_template: '{{value_json.sensordata.parentdevicename}} {{value_json.sensordata.lastmessage}}'
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