I have setup an instance of Home Assistant as the easiest front end for interacting with my home automation setup. While I am using the Universal Devices ISY994 as the primary communication hub for my Insteon devices, Home Assistant provides a much nicer interface for my family, including a great mobile app for them to use the system.
With my foray into monitoring, I started looking around to see if I was able to get some device metrics from Home Assistant into my Grafana Mimir instance. Turns out, there is an a Prometheus integration built right in to Home Assistant.
Read the Manual
Most of my blog posts are “how to” style: I find a problem that maybe I could not find an exact solution for online, and walk you through the steps. In this case, though, it was as simple as reading the configuration instructions for the Prometheus integration.
ServiceMonitor?
Well, almost that easy. I have been using ServiceMonitor resources within my clusters, rather than setting up explicit scrape configs. Generally, this is easier to manage, since I just install the Prometheus operator, and then create ServiceMonitor instances when I want Prometheus to scrape an endpoint.
The Home Assistant Prometheus endpoint requires a token, however, and I did not have the desire to dig in to configuring a ServiceMonitor with an appropriate secret. For now, it is a to-do on my ever-growing list
What can I do now?
This integration has opened up a LOT of new alerts on my end. Home Assistant talks to many of the devices in my home, including lights and garage doors. This means I can write alerts for when lights go on or off, when the garage door goes up or down, and, probably the best, when devices are reporting low battery.
The first alert I wrote was to alert me when my Ring Doorbell battery drops below 30%. Couple that with my Prometheus Alerts module for Magic Mirror, and I now get a display when the battery needs changed.
What’s Next?
I am giving back to the community. The Prometheus integration for Home Assistant does not currently report cover statuses. Covers are things like shades or, in my case, garage doors. Since I would like to be able to alert when the garage door is open, I am working on a pull request to add cover support to the Prometheus integration.
It also means I would LOVE to get my hands on some automated shades/blinds… but that sounds really expensive.
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