Are there any PING 'presence' apps (similar to 'Virtual IP presence sensor') that do not depend on the brain-dead PING implementation built into the firmware?
The built-in one doesn't allow you to set a timeout and has a ridiculously high default of 10 seconds, and when you have a device that is designed to be offline more than online, it will overburden the IP stack and eventually spam: com.hubitat.app.exception.LimitExceededException: Device N generates excessive hub load on line 69 (method ping)
Not an unreasonable request for @gopher.ny to add a timeout parameter if possible (I would have use for it myself).
Polling such devices to determine their status is not ideal. Tell us more about your use-case: is there anyway the device itself could hit an endpoint when it wakes ? Do so periodically? Assume it's offline if it hasn't called that endpoint on the hub in X time?
Depending on the scale of what you are wanting to monitor, and while I haven't followed through on setting anything substantial up yet myself, I would prefer to offload this kind of network monitoring to something other than HE, like you have done with Node RED. I could accept a small level of monitoring on HE if the numbers of devices were small and they releatd directly to processes I was configuring on HE, but anything else I would prefer to manage outside of HE. Nothing against HE for this purpose, just I don't feel I want to overload it with more network or CPU traffic than is necessary for the automations I want to configure.
In this case, no, the device cannot hit an endpoint by itself, but I want to start a rule (that powers off a Zigbee Plug) as soon as it stops responding. It's just the single device, not a heap of devices...
(Although, now that I have this NodeRED solution, I can think of other ways to use it, like keeping track of how long and when my son is on his gaming PC, Switch or XBox... )
The NodeRED solution works fine for me, so I am not going to pursue this any further unless a reliable ping health monitor app appears...
Whatever works for your setup.... That's not a cop-out or back-handed swipe at your choices, just an acknowledgement that everyone's setup is different.
That's exactly my approach to home automation: pragmatism...
#1 factor: WAF #2 factor: comfort/ease of use and reliability
The rest comes after that
(I have too many other things on my hands to spend more time on this side, so I try to find the quickest, easiest way to get things done, and in this case that was a simple NodeRED flow...)
It's literally running ping behind the scenes, and all I got to work with is -W parameter that takes seconds. It's a very limited Linux implementation. I'm thinking a quick solution now vs. a nicer solution (probably much) later.
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