Is It Online? Monitor Your NAS, Raspberry Pi and Smart Home Devices

The NAS that runs your backups, the Raspberry Pi with Home Assistant, the camera at the door. Some devices should simply always be on, and you usually find out they weren't when you need them. In this video we'll set up monitoring for a home network, see which devices drop out and when, and get told the moment it happens.

As always, this is DeviceShelf's demo network, a made-up home with forty-four devices.

Open Monitoring. With background monitoring on, DeviceShelf scans the network at a fixed interval, five minutes by default, and remembers for every device whether it answered. You choose the interval here. Shorter means you notice outages sooner.

The uptime list sorts the problems first. Almost everything here is at a hundred percent. The exception is the Raspberry Pi, at just under ninety-seven percent over thirty days. That's about a day in total, so worth a closer look.

Open the device and go to History. The availability strip shows each check as a small bar, green when the device answered and red when it didn't. Below, the response time over time, and the list of outages with start, end and duration.

The pattern tells you a lot. A device that drops out every night at the same time is usually switched off by a timer or a power-saving setting. Short, random gaps point to a weak Wi-Fi connection. And a response time that creeps up before each outage often means the device itself is struggling.

Under Settings, Alerts, you decide when a device counts as offline. Standard waits for three missed checks in a row, so a short hiccup doesn't wake you. Instant reacts to the first miss, which suits a server that should never blink. Tolerant waits for six.

Alerts come as desktop notifications, by e-mail, or through a webhook, for example into Home Assistant. Quiet hours keep it silent at night, and maintenance windows cover the evening you reboot everything on purpose.

Not every device deserves an alert. A battery doorbell that sleeps between rings, or a phone, would fill your inbox. Open the device, and under Monitoring mute its online and offline alerts. The history keeps recording.

A device can answer while the thing you care about is down: the NAS is reachable, but its web interface hangs. Under Settings, Checks, you add checks for exactly that: a ping, a TCP port, an HTTP address, or an SNMP value, each with a warning and an error threshold. They run on the monitoring interval and alert like everything else.

Above them are the connectivity checks: whether your internet connection is up, whether names still resolve, and when a TLS certificate or a domain is about to expire.

Monitoring only works while DeviceShelf runs. The external watchdog covers the case where the watcher itself goes down: DeviceShelf pings a service like Healthchecks.io every minute, and when the pings stop, that service raises the alarm.

For real around-the-clock monitoring, run the server edition on a machine that's always on: a NAS, a Raspberry Pi or a mini PC, as a Docker container. It keeps watching while your laptop sleeps, and the desktop app connects to it under Remote servers.

Further down, the presence list shows for every device whether it answered the last check, and when it was last seen. Devices that are known but currently away, like a guest's phone or a work laptop that went home, are listed too. And the timeline records every change: when a device went offline, when it came back, and when it joined for the first time.

Over time, DeviceShelf folds every day into a short summary and keeps it for years: the year in review shows how reliable each device really was, long after the detailed history has been pruned.

So: switch on background monitoring, look at the uptime list and the history of the problem cases, choose how strict the offline rule should be, and mute the devices that come and go by design. Add checks for the services that matter, and run the server edition if it has to watch around the clock.

More videos about your home network are on our channel. DeviceShelf runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, at deviceshelf dot app.