Hostwatch — Home Assistant add-on

Fast host up/down monitoring for Home Assistant. Hostwatch probes your machines over ICMP or TCP every few seconds and publishes a binary_sensor (device class connectivity) per host via MQTT discovery, so a box sleeping, powering off, or coming back shows in Home Assistant within seconds — not the minutes the built-in ping integration takes.

Why not just use…

• Built-in Ping integration — a slow, fixed poll, and consider_home holds a host "home" for minutes. Not tunable to seconds.
• Uptime Kuma — a great general uptime dashboard, but a 20s minimum check interval, no native per-host HA entities (it integrates via webhooks/notifications), and it's a full Node + DB + web-UI app.
• ping2mqtt — the closest prior art (ICMP → MQTT discovery) and the inspiration here. Hostwatch adds a TCP probe so hosts that block ICMP (many Windows machines by default) still register, plus per-host sub-10s intervals and Home Assistant add-on packaging.

Install

1. Click the button above, or in Home Assistant go to Settings → Add-ons → Add-on Store → ⋮ → Repositories and add https://github.com/jcv/hostwatch.
2. Install Hostwatch from the store, add your hosts in the Configuration tab, and start it.

Requires an MQTT broker (e.g. the Mosquitto broker add-on) with the MQTT integration configured. Hostwatch discovers the broker automatically — no credentials to enter.

Configure

interval: 5
timeout: 2
hosts:
  - name: NAS
    host: 192.168.1.20        # ICMP ping (default)
  - name: Desktop
    host: 192.168.1.30        # blocks ICMP → use TCP
    method: tcp
    port: 3389
    interval: 3

Each host becomes binary_sensor.hostwatch_<name> (device class connectivity), grouped under one Hostwatch device. Full reference: hostwatch/DOCS.md.

License

MIT.