Managed HA Installations

[chrisjcbt (Chris)]

Hi there,

I’m working my way towards building my own business providing smart home installations and support. I’ve been using HA, and helping others install HA for around two few years now. The results have been great. As HA release cycles become more stable (less breaking changes), I am finding the support support demands lessen customer to customer.

Still, compared to a platform like Loxone we have a way to go. Please don’t take that as a negative against HA, its not. I appreciate I’m comparing a closed system, to an open-source platform which seeks to integrate rather than own. But below are my asks for HA to ready for a Managed Install (or one where the install is supported by a Professional Installer). These may well be more directly targeted towards Nabu Casa, rather than the core HA project itself (hence the tag).

1. Reseller Nabu Casa Subscription (supporting multiple installs).
I would like a way that I can provide support and assistance to many customers. Through a reseller program I could offer them a Nabu Casa subscription, giving them remote access quickly and easily, as well as exposing entities to Alexa or Google to their mobile devices. But at the same time, I have a single view into all the customers I look after, incl. their setup, access on demand, along stats for their Supervisor and Core versions etc.

2. Snapshot Backups to NabuCasa
With the installs I do, I install using either a NUC or ODROID device. Snapshots are taken as an automation, with custom integrations to push those to a separate storage layer. I would love for these snaps to be hosted through a Nabu Casa subscription. In the event of a hardware failure, the perfect scenario for me is as follows: I ship a new device, the customer plugs it in, powers it up, and at the setup-UI for HA they logon to their Nabu Casa subscription. At this point they are given the option to download and install their latest snapshot.

3. Update Controls
Imagine I’m managing 50 or 100 customer installs. HA has an incredible pace of updates, blisteringly fast compared to anyone else. In that situation though, I need to check if each customer has integrations, or custom components which might be impacted by that update. It would be incredible if HA could let me know that a particular minor or major update has breaking changes which would impact that particular customer install. It would enable me to scale to more customers, with less risk.

4. Host Reports
Again, imagine I’m looking after 100 customer installs. Most likely some of them will have hardware issues on the way, or will be resource constrained. It would be amazing if HA could push me some form of weekly or monthly report which shows host level health: RAM, CPU, Storage, Network utilisation, disk health etc. Knowing this in advance, allows me to choose to swap out some hardware for a customer, before their experience is broken because a disk has failed.

Happy to hear what others think, and keen to get some feedback.
Chris

[KingRichard (Richard T)]

I would like to know more… I believe you are hitting the right way. I’m planning to support an entire Apartment complex and wondering how to support it should the project run. Anyway hope someone from HA response to this…

[francisp (Francis)]

Backup has been asked before

Nabu Casa - Configuration Backup

I think a good feature to make the $5 per month more bearable would be an option for configuration backups to the cloud.

and multiple accounts too :

Nabu Casa single account to manage multiple instances

Hi there, I’ve contacted Nabu Casa asking them about some features, but never got a response, so I’ll suggest those features here. Currently, I have a single Home Assistant instance that I’m managing via the cloud (https://remote.nabucasa.com/), I’m preparing another two instances that I also want to manage via the cloud. The problem is that I must create 3 different accounts on the Nabu Casa website, assign my card 3 times. I’d like to have a single account (let’s call it the admin account…

[chrisjcbt (Chris)]

Hi @francisp - thanks for the feedback. Completely agree the features are asked for already. I went for a new feature request, rather than +1 on those because for this to work it needs the context of an “installer” user type, as well as the existing “end customer” user type we have today. Having Cloud Backups or Multiple Installs in one Nabu Casa subscription won’t help me because it means one customer could see another’s backups for example.

Hope thats ok, I’m not trying to create any duplication.

[vincen (Vincèn)]

@chrisjcbt

Having Cloud Backups

For cloud backups I have beenusing successfully since quite a while the Nextcloud plugin (GitHub - Sebclem/hassio-nextcloud-backup: Hass.io Add-on: Backup your snapshots to Nextcloud) that allows to get backups out of hassio box and as it’s using native Hassio backup system I can easily restore my whole system anytime if something goes wrong by downloading the last backup from my Nextcloud and restoring on a fresh setup of ha I can create as many accounts in my Nextcloud as I have of customers so confidentiality is maintained and the Nextcloid is running on a server I control and manage (which avoids all issues of confidentiality with public clouds