Is there any way to notify myself via pushover when my hub goes offline? I'm aware of other manual work arounds, but curious if there is anything out of box via cloud monitoring. Any thoughts?
I'm not aware of anything cloud based. With the proper battery backup for Hubitat, router, and modem you can use this kit from The Smartest House.
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I have a notification if the hub powers up. I know this dosent really answer your question but as good as I have!
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Yes, but if the power and internet go down, how will I receive the notification? I believe this level of monitoring needs to be cloud based where the cloud solution is pinging my local HE hub via external URL?
i use an apc smart ups on my hub with a driver i wrote and rules to alert me that the power is out/resstored and also shut down the hub when batteries get low.. you probalby should also put your cable modem/router on an ups (i do) but anyway if you use the notify to your phone option you should get an alert even if internet is down.
I use a UPS to keep powering my hubitat, router, and modem. That won't help if the cable internet is dead upstream from my house, but a cloud solution wouldn't work then either.
Re: Detecting power outages...
If you really, really need to know the power is out, you might use some variation of our system.
We now live in a rural area of Maine, on an island in a lake, with only one other home nearby (heaven, to us). Before we moved here full-time (abandoning the burbs, which we hated anyway, when COVID hit) it was our vacation property, 500 miles from our home. Given that it can drop to well below zero here and that electricity is a big part of powering things like boilers and security systems, monitoring for an outage became a big deal. We have an automatic "off-grid duty" generator and a large quantity of propane (over a month's worth with the generator running), but we needed to know if those backup systems failed so we could call in someone to address it. So, here's what we did...
Each of what was then two buildings gets its own hub (an ISY originally, now switched to an HE). Each building gets a UPS (to handle the few seconds until the generator kicks in) and a Digital Loggers AC power sensing relay (search for it - under $15. Their link looks "spammy" when I try to insert it here) that can plug into any AC outlet. I plug it into the "surge protection only" part of the UPS. That then connects to a MIMO Lite z-wave device, which is connected to the hub via z-wave and into the battery side of the UPS. Each hub (the HE) is also connected to the battery side of the UPS.
For internet, we went with a Peplink Balance 30 router in one building that connects to the other building through buried ethernet (also on the battery side of the UPS). It can have two WAN connections and also two separate cellular connections (just pop in a SIM card into each slot), with failover logic that switches to the backup if the WAN can't see the outside world. Our ISP is a 4G signal that comes from a tower to the south of us (the primary WAN) so we made the backup cellular a different carrier with a tower to the north of us. We originally had satellite as well, but it was so bad we ditched it. This makes the Peplink the "weak link" because if it fails, the whole thing fails. We considered a second Peplink but with us here full-time now it isn't as important.
So far, this has worked perfectly, and proved far more reliable than the local alarm company's radio-based monitoring system (which was horrible). For those without a need for backup internet connections, just the AC relay and MIMO Lite and HE, all plugged into a USP, should work well. Anyway, my two cents, if it helps anyone.
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Very nice solution, I'm sure it wasn't cheap!
I went with a custom solution where I run a program on the cloud in AWS. It pings my HE hub every minute, after 5 failures the program sends me a pushover notification to my mobile phone. The assumption here is that either I lost power or my internet connection went down. Either way, someone needs to inspect in this scenario. It works pretty well so far.
Definitely not a pushover expert, but I don’t think it’s able to monitor a connection on its own and send a notification when the attempt to connect fails.
Presumably the Hubitat cloud can recognize when a hub has lost its connection to the internet, but I’m not aware of any way to leverage that into a pushover notification either.
I think you need something like your AWS instance that lives in the cloud, can ping your hub, and can interact with the pushover API.
Depending on the details of the power outage, this can allow for pushover notifications to be sent when power is lost (and restored). UPSes and some other devices can report to the hub when they’re on battery backup or mains power.
Obviously that won’t work if the power loss is widespread enough to affect a link in the chain that’s not powered by a UPS.
This is exactly how I have it setup.
or an apc smart ups smt 750 1000 or 1500 with an ap9630 ir 9631 net card. then you can run my smart ups device handler and kill two birds with one stone.. battery backup for the hub and power notifications.
I have two systems that will alert me if power and/or internet goes out. For power, I have a Synology NAS connected to a UPS. The NAS will alert me when it goes on and off battery power. I have my modem, router, and hubs on a dedicated UPS as well.
For internet, SmartThings will alert me when the hub can't be reached. That isn't as reliable though because of the numerous outages they have had lately. Maybe this is something the Hubitat team can implement in a future update?
Another thing you could look at is using a cellular router as a failover. Also using a Ring Security Extender can tell you if the power is out and works as a nice repeater.
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@Madcodger you should look into Starlink, this service was made exactly for people in your situation, Beta reviews seem pretty good also, I know someone that was going to try it out but bailed out since the local cable company finally extended the service to the 5 houses at the end of the road.
I've been on the wait list for Starlink for several weeks, eagerly awaiting an invitation. Starlink looks very promising. I have a few concerns about trees in our area, especially to do a test without brining in a high lift to put it way up on the roof, but we'll see.
Anyway, back to the original question, the problem is often that of distinguishing between power loss and just loss of internet. Connecting to a cloud service is notoriously unreliable as a method, as cloud services themselves go down with some frequency. Personally, I like having everything on a UPS except a device to detect the outage, and a couple of ways to reach the building remotely to verify you're dealing with an AC outage from the utility (one problem), no AC at all because a generator then didn't start (another problem), or just a down internet connection through your primary source (third problem). Depending on one's situation, it becomes a matter of specificity in the diagnosis.
