adding my home electricity uptime to status.href.cat
8 points by markerz
8 points by markerz
This post is a testament to building personal software. I started programming because I could solve many problems in my personal life with a little code. […] The software I’m most proud of is the one that notified my friend whenever a new dog was available for adoption at our local shelter. […] Give it a shot, build small software, and make your friends happy.
This right here is exactly what got me interested in software when I was first starting out, and I guess I kind of lost sight of that in doing that professionally. Especially lately, I just haven’t had the energy to do any personal projects, but the joy that got me doing this as a career is still there, even if my dayjob doesn’t always feel that way.
Neat. At first when I opened this I expected some incredibly high tech solution to the problem. However I was well surprised the solution was so simple. Wouldn’t this technically measure the downtime of your electricity?
Thank you!
Yeah, it would measure the uptime of my home internet, electricity, and my n8n self-hosted server. But it’s a pretty good approximate and I know when my n8n server goes down with a different health-check so it’s easy for me to see.
I also like that the solution is simple. Low-code solutions genuinely have gotten to a useful place, and it’s worth it even for high-tech workers to learn.
Is n8n needed here in the final solution? Looks like the uptime monitor could potentially curl the router directly without the intermediary.
I use n8n to hide credentials. n8n exposes a single endpoint that only says if my router is online or offline. Behind the hood, n8n is fully authenticated to my Eero account and could do things like reboot my network and change settings. I feel more comfortable having those credentials live in my self-hosted n8n instance than on my free UptimeRobot account.
n8n also parses the JSON response from Eero, whereas UptimeRobot can only search for keywords. n8n interprets the JSON and returns an HTTP status code that UptimeRobot understands much better. I couldn’t quite express the query I wanted with UptimeRobot’s form.
Moreover, UptimeRobot does not support cookie-based authentication, and authenticated endpoints are a paid feature that costs at least $7/mo.