Many Home Assistant integrations depend on external web services, such as proprietary APIs for controlling heating systems, robot mowers, ACs, or public APIs for weather, air quality, or waste collection data.
When these external services undergo maintenance, updates, or outages, or make breaking changes to their APIs, it often results in:
- Broken dashboards
- Bloated log files
- A bad gut feeling on the reliability of HA
To improve this, why not implement better, standardized exception handling for external service dependencies across integrations?
For instance, by requiring explicit declarations of consumed external services and availability checks, HA could:
- Provide a central overview of all external services and endpoints in use by each integration.
- Help users quickly diagnose issues caused by service outages or breaking changes.
- Allow the system to gracefully handle disruptions, such as temporarily hiding or disabling affected entities and UI elements.
This would likely significantly improve user experience, system reliability, and ease troubleshooting issues with integrations dependent on external APIs.