Your system status - alarms

On daily basis I’m working with a cloud and I know how a monitoring and alarms are important to detect a system failure.
We’re integrating all kind of systems and devices and there are some cases, which should trigger our action.
Examples:

  1. Wifi smart socket is disconnecting and connecting again every several minutes (maybe there’s a need to reset something)
  2. Some device is disconnected by accident (someone is a house disconnected an air-purifier from a socket because he/she had to charge a phone)
  3. My device’s battery is dying (e.g. <10% left)

In a current situation I’d need to create an automation which would trigger an action when some edge case would happen (push notification, set some helper to specific value etc.) but I think automations are not the right way to handle such issues.

So imagine a following situation:

  • I’m creating an alarm in HA, which will monitor my air-purifier.
  • settings: when air-purifier is in unavailable state for more than 5 mins set an alarm, otherwise clear an alarm.
  • Alarms dashboard / system health dashboard should show this alarm right away and some additional action (depend on an importance could be also triggered)

In my opinion such feature could save a tons of time to create mechanisms to monitor our devices batteries and ensure that everything is always connected to the system.

How are you checking if your smart home is working as it should ? How do you know that the device didn’t disconnect from a system?

How are you checking if your smart home is working as it should ? How do you know that the device didn’t disconnect from a system?

I use PRTG running on a virtual machine with sensors on all my switches, my servers, my NAS and so on. It can monitor basic stuff like ping, but also more advanced checks like free disk space and so on. This can also be used to monitor wifi plugs and other devices communicating by your internal LAN.

From the outside I use uptimerobot to monitor that my HA instance is available.

For my zigbee stuff I use the Offline detection blueprint.

Only thing I haven’t had time to set up yet is monitoring that my MiFlora plant sensors don’t run out of battery.