If you’ve never used it before, you may think Home Assistant is a platform for managing smart devices. But between the myriads of integrations, community add-ons, and the offerings on Home Assistant Community Store, you can interface a ton of cool gizmos with your HASS server. With the right integration, you can even control self-hosted services and home server distros from your HASS dashboards.

This includes network scanning tools like NetAlertX. And considering all the stats NetAlertX can grab from your LAN, it can double as a terrific companion for your Home Assistant automations.

NetAlertX is a reliable network scanner with light IDS facilities

Even a standalone server is worth setting up for non-HASS users

On its own, NetAlertX is a network monitor that can track the IP address, MAC address, last known state, and other details about all the devices connected to your home network. If that sounds familiar, it’s because NetAlertX is pretty much a rebranded version of Pi.Alert with extra features.

For instance, NetAlertX doubles as a neat network documentation tool, as you can archive the vendors, users, and locations for your LAN devices, and even group similar gadgets (or virtual guests) under the same group. Heck, it can even store data about devices that are no longer paired to your LAN, which is pretty neat when you run disposable LXCs and VMs like I do.

On the monitoring front, the app keeps an eye on the uptime and connection status of your LAN devices. NetAlertX can chart slick graphs based on the operational status and time of the systems connected to your home network. But aside from supporting multiple network scanners, NetAlertX’s main draw is its ability to send notifications whenever there’s a change in the uptime status of your devices. Since it can ping you upon detecting new devices, the app also doubles as a light intrusion detection system. Throw in its ability to trigger WoL packets for your devices, and you can see why I love it so much. And that’s before I talk about its utility in automation projects…

It gets even better when you combine it with Home Assistant

It can send network data to HASS dashboards

Although NetAlertX is worth setting up if you’re even remotely into the self-hosting ecosystem, its usefulness jumps to the next level once you combine it with Home Assistant. That’s because NetAlertX can import your devices and connection details as entities into HASS, essentially turning them into typical IoT products for the smart home management platform.

For starters, you can create Home Assistant dashboards with your LAN devices. If you’re running a dedicated LLM alongside Home Assistant like I do, you can query the AI agent for the connection details about every device in your home network. I’ve even created an HASS dashboard displaying the IPv4 addresses of my virtual machines, so I don’t have to memorize their connection details when accessing them over SSH.

And lets you design automation chains using network entities

The biggest benefit of having your network devices as HASS entities is that you can automate them using simple trigger-action scripts. And I’m not talking about receiving notifications when a device goes offline, either. As an example, you can create a workflow that automatically turns off the smart devices in your home lab when you shut down your server.

I’ve connected my Proxmox and TrueNAS nodes to HASS, which lets me create wacky automation chains where Home Assistant can automatically shut down virtual guests if NetAlertX reports their IP addresses as unavailable.

Deploying NetAlertX on Home Assistant

You’ll need an MQTT server to send data to HASS though

Most self-hosted services can be deployed in a couple of ways, and NetAlertX is no exception. While you can manually configure a docker-compose.yml file, I went with the NetAlertX add-on, which deploys this service on top of Home Assistant. Developer alexbelgium’s GitHub repo includes an add-on for NetAlertX, and deploying it is as simple as clicking on the add-on’s link and agreeing to install it on HASS.

While you can access NetAlertX’s web UI from HASS, you’ll have to initialize an MQTT server to send your network data to the smart home management platform. I used the official Mosquitto broker add-on to deploy it without any hassle. Once Mosquitto broker was online, I headed into its Configuration tab and added a new user account under the Logins section.

Then, I switched to NetAlertX’s web UI and headed to the Core section within the Settings tab. Since the MQTT publisher isn’t enabled by default, I added MQTT inside the Loaded Plugins option and used the Save button to apply the changes. With the MQTT plugin available, I headed to the Publishers section and entered the MQTT broker URL (which is my HASS’s IP address), broker port (1883 by default), and the username and password strings I’d created inside Mosquitto broker.

After saving the configuration yet again, I headed back to my Home Assistant instance, created a new dashboard, and tried adding all entities that began with NetAlertX. That turned out to be a bad decision, because soon my dashboard was flooded with all the devices in my home lab, and I had to spend some time configuring the metrics I wanted to display on Home Assistant.

NetAlertX isn’t the only cool service you can combine with HASS

If you love connecting different self-hosted services with the all-powerful smart home platform, I’ve got a couple more recommendations. The Frigate integration on HACS lets you connect your surveillance system with Home Assistant, while the Vikunja Voice Assistant can create and send tasks to your to-do list server. For folks who run multiple containers, you can use the Docker Status integration to keep an eye on them from HASS, while the Beszel integration can pull the uptime statistics of your server nodes.