Why Home Assistant Ping and AI? For a long time, my home network had a bad habit.
Everything looked fine…
Wi-Fi was connected. Internet was “up”. Router lights were blinking happily.
And yet — videos were kind of slow loading, websites would load like it was 2006, and I had very often disconnects from my VPN.
The worst part?
I had no idea why.
That’s when I started digging deeper into Home Assistant Ping, and eventually combined Home Assistant Ping and AI into something way more powerful than I expected.
This article explains what I built, why it matters, and how you can learn the full setup step by step AND there will be a live stream tomorrow:
Feb 11 @ 20:00 UTC add this to your calendar so not to miss it:
Table of Contents
The problem with “basic” network monitoring
Home Assistant Ping is great.
It can tell you if something is reachable or not.
But let’s be honest — this kind of information isn’t always helpful.
Knowing that:
- the internet is “up”
- the router responds
- your laptop answers pings
…doesn’t explain why your network feels bad.
What I was missing were answers to questions like:
- Is this packet loss normal?
- Is this just a short spike or an ongoing problem?
- Is the issue my Wi-Fi, my router, or my ISP?
That’s where Home Assistant Ping and AI completely changed the game.
What changed when I went deeper with Home Assistant Ping
Instead of just checking if things are reachable, I started tracking:
- Packet loss
- Jitter
- Round-trip time (RTT)
And not just “right now”…
But compared to:
- the last 24 hours
- the last 7 days
This is where Home Assistant Ping becomes truly powerful.
Suddenly I could see:
- what “normal” looks like for my network
- when something was actually unusual
- when problems were temporary vs ongoing
But there was still one problem…
I had data.
Not answers.
Adding AI: turning numbers into plain English
Graphs are cool, network jargon is nice.
But I don’t want to analyze graphs, and become a network guy every time my internet acts wierd.
So I connected Home Assistant Ping and AI using:
- historical statistics
- current network state
- an AI model that explains things like a human
Now instead of guessing, I get messages like:
“This is a temporary abnormality caused by Wi-Fi congestion.”
“This looks like an ongoing ISP issue.”
“Everything is normal — your network is actually performing better than usual.”
That’s when I realized:
I accidentally built a network sanity checker.
And yes — it runs entirely inside Home Assistant.
Why this matters (even if you’re not a network nerd)
You don’t need to be a networking expert to benefit from this.
If you:
- work from home
- game online
- rely on video calls, or watch YT often
- stream media
- or just want your internet to behave
Then Home Assistant Ping combined with AI gives you:
- clarity instead of guesswork
- context instead of raw numbers
- explanations instead of assumptions
And once you set it up, it just quietly watches your network in the background.
No drama. No constant alerts. Just insight.
I’m breaking everything down live (step by step)
Because a lot of people will probably be interested how all this works, I’m doing a live stream where I explain:
- How Home Assistant Ping really works
- What packet loss, jitter, and RTT actually mean
- How to compare “now” vs “normal”
- How AI fits into the picture
- How all of this comes together in one clean automation
👉 Watch the live stream here on Feb 11 @ 20:00 UTC:
https://youtube.com/live/YaQ2SKMHYPA
If you’ve ever looked at your network and thought
“Okay… but what does this actually mean?” — this stream is for you.
Want the full setup? I made a PDF for that
During the live stream, I also reference a full step-by-step PDF guide.
It includes:
- How to add Home Assistant Ping properly
- How to enable packet loss, jitter, and RTT sensors
- How to create 24h and 7-day baselines
- How to connect everything with AI
- Ready-to-use YAML and explanations
👉 Get the full PDF here:
https://automatelike.pro/aiping
How the download works (quick & honest explanation)
To get the PDFs:
- You enter your name and email
- You’ll receive an email from me
- You confirm that you’re not a robot 🤖
- The PDF is yours to keep
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No hard feelings — I promise 🙂
Final thoughts
I didn’t set out to “give my network a brain”.
I just wanted to understand why my internet sometimes felt bad when everything looked fine.
Home Assistant Ping gave me the data.
Home Assistant Ping and AI gave me the understanding.
If you’ve ever felt the same frustration — you’ll probably enjoy this approach too.
See you in the live stream or in my other AI + HA articles: https://peyanski.com/category/smart-home/ai/
Add this to your fav calendar Feb 11 @ 20:00 UTC & hit that “notify me” button so YT to remind you:
https://youtube.com/live/YaQ2SKMHYPA
This project seems to be a great concept.
However, a couple of points arise:
1. The automation remains running and Traces show that it has started the process AI Task: Generate data. I am attempting to analyse why this is happening.
2. Before setting this up, my NUC had 1.1G of free storage and was not using any Swap. Now, it only has 102.5M free storage and is using 1.5G of Swap. Ideally, I would install the LLM onto a separate machine and run all its processing there linking from the Home Assistant NUC to perform the AI queries. I need to work on determining how to achieve this. If anyone has any idea how to, I would appreciate hearing from them.
Best regards
Joe.
Hi again Joe,
if you are using local LLM models that is totally normal they are very resource hungry and they can and will take everything that you have from your machine. There are only two things you can do if you want to stay local only (and not using cloud models): 1. Use smaller LLM models (which unfortunately are not so clever). 2. Upgrade your machine massively. On the other hand, If you are ok to share data with the Cloud then use Cloud LLM models and your NUC will fly (you will not need a separate machine). Enjoy!
Network Health Check (AI) reports that there is no historical baseline data to compare against.
All of the 24H and 168H sensors have a Status of Unavailable.
The sensors for packet_loss; average_rtt; and jitter all contain data. It appears that the config.yaml sensor entries for the Statistics Platform are not working.
I would appreciate any guidance to analyze this issue.
Many thanks
Joe
Hi Joe, you probably have some sensor names mismatches double check the sensor names (entity IDs) and update those names in your 24h and 168h template sensors or try to create one of these through the GUI. Just follow the steps in the PDF and you will be fine!
Good evening Kiril,
Many thanks for your responses – they are very much appreciated.
In the end, I decided to remove the statistic sensors from configuration.yaml and to set them up by creating helpers. All the statistic sensors 24h and 168h are starting to populate so that is looking good.
I’ve also added an if-then action at the end of the Automation to check the contents of the ai_response.data and send a notification to my mobile telephone only if the result contains the word Abnormal – I didn’t want hourly reports because it’s too easy to miss an important notification among those just reporting that everything is Normal. Of course, I tested it by looking for the word Normal until I got it working and, after that was successful, I changed it to look for the word Abnormal.
I can see this being very useful in being alerted to a potential issue and fixing it before anyone in the home is impacted.
Currently, I’m using a Cloud model – as you suggested. It is very fast so I’m super happy with it. I’m not passing any sensitive information to the Cloud so I have no concerns. However, after it has “bedded in” for a while, I may attempt running Ollama with a Local model on a separate machine. If I can get it to be reasonably responsive, I will attempt to have the Home Assistant NUC run as a Client of this Ollama Server. However, that can wait for a while.
Thanks again for a great implementation of an excellent idea.
Best regards
Joe.
Hi there Joe, glad you make it and thanks for sharing your story. Also the if-then action for checking only the abnormal state is great addition to the example automation that I shared. Thanks for the idea I may reuse that in the future. Dedicated Ollama machine approach is a great toy to play with and if you have enough time, resource and energy – go for it, otherwise stick with the Ollama-HA app approach as it is working great. No matter what you decide just have fun and enjoy!