One outdoor sensor is the Hue outdoor motion sensor. It reports illuminance infrequently even though I've set the granularity on it's device page to 1 Lux. My workaround is to do a refresh on it every 5 minutes between sunrise and sunset.
The rest of my illuminance measurements are provided by @iharyadi's Hubitat with Homemade Temperature, Humidity, Pressure and Light sensor These things are fast with the updates! So much so that I had to provide some integration (the math kind) on the illuminance reading from the sensor in my hallway to avoid a false trigger from my shadow as I walk past it.
As for services...none. I'm very much a local-only guy and I block many devices at my firewall, including HE, from ever getting to the Internet. That said, I obviously have to allow the connections briefly to get updates to any of those devices.
Anything I say to address that would be speculation because I don't have an Echo and I didn't even consider using the dashboard. Sorry.
It is very powerful and not too hard to use...once you get the hang of it. It's way different than doing things in HE (note: I have never tried either HA or WebCore). That's both good and bad. A very common comment on NR is it's a
Tip: run it natively if you can and in Docker only if you have to. Some here will say Docker is the only way but I disagree (unless a person has other apps in it already) because it's one more layer that needs to be learned and managed.
If you do decide to dive into the hole you'll want to check out a couple topics here...
And there are many others, just search for node-red.
Good luck!
