Please introduce the option to customize Ping integration polling interval to the UI or provide a secondary Ping integration for only LOCAL connections that has a polling interval option in the UI.
I know you have reasons to not want to add this to the UI (HA github Issue #105163)
As the post suggests, this option is not currently available in order to prevent HA users from setting their ping interval too low leading to them getting blocked by external services. This is a noble goal and novice users should be protected from breaking their system, but you’re skirting a fine line between protecting users from themselves and making the Ping platform a pain to work with.
The current state of the integration leaves much to be desired for more advanced users. Sure we can make an automation to customize the polling interval, but this causes several problems:
Decentralized Ping entry management as opposed to YAML config from before.
Having to switch between automations page and ping integration page is a pain.
Massive automation bloat for my 100+ local network ping entries.
Creating and editing custom automations for each ping entry is much more time consuming.
Bottom line, the UI is nice. While I preferred the YAML configuration, I understand HA wants to become more structured and user friendly. I just don’t agree with hamstringing advanced users into using a gimmicky workaround for something that really should be available in the integration UI.
I know, the fact that the dev team considers the “work around” to be an acceptable method of achieving this functionality is the problem for the reasons I described. If a user wants to make a custom uptime tracker by pinging their devices on their own local network, having to make a separate automation for each device is about the most roundabout way to do this. Which hurts extra hard considering how easy this was to do before. Am I missing something or what?
I am mainly trying to bring awareness to how annoying this implementation is in practice. Hence this feature request.
It was deliberately made slightly more difficult so that uninformed users could not easily pound public APIs into the dust.
Complaints from API operators were being made to the Home Assistant team. Something had to be done.
The thinking is that if you are clever enough to to change the polling interval then you should also be the sort of person that understands the consequences.
It’s a compromise. You can still ping your local servers to death if you wish to, it has not been taken away completely - which I’m sure was also an option they considered.