Monitoring the status of your Home Assistant is crucial, especially when you’re away from home and want to be alerted to power outages or other issues. Traditional solutions that monitor local services or ping your home URL often fall short due to internet outages or inaccessible home networks. In my case, my Home Assistant computer is not open to the Internet and I control it only locally due to security concerns (I’m using a VPN for when controlling something at home is needed). Here’s a reliable and easy-to-set-up method using a free online service and a freely available Home Assistant addon to ensure you get alerts even when your Home Assistant is down.
Step-by-Step Guide
- Create an Account on healthchecks.io:
Start by creating a free account on healthchecks.io. This service provides you with a unique URL that you need to ping regularly. If the service stops receiving your pings, healthchecks.io knows something is wrong and can alert you.
After creating your account, set up a “check” with the desired interval. For instance, I set up mine to expect pings every hour with a grace period of 30 minutes.
- Set Up Uptime Kuma Addon in Home Assistant:
Instead of using a Home Assistant automation, you can use the Uptime Kuma addon. Install Uptime Kuma by following the instructions on its GitHub page.
After installation, add a new monitor in Uptime Kuma:
- Select HTTP(s) as the monitor type.
- Enter the URL provided by healthchecks.io in the URL field.
- Set the ping interval to match the period you defined on healthchecks.io.
Summary
Using the Uptime Kuma addon in Home Assistant to ping a healthchecks.io URL ensures you get alerts when your system is down. This method avoids the need to expose your Home Assistant instance to the internet and simplifies the setup process. By regularly pinging the URL, healthchecks.io can notify you if the pings stop, indicating a potential power outage or system failure. As an added bonus, you can also use Uptime Kuma to also monitor other services in your Home Assistant, check that other addons are behaving, IP cameras are still connected, etc.