Best way to capture and store all home network / automation information?

[carlsnewton]

I've spent the last couple of months working on "fixing" / getting to know, the home automation that was in place (HAI OmniPro) and installing a bunch of newer products managed through HomeSeer.

I would like to document what I have in the network, and those things that are not IP addressable but managed devices in HomeSeer. In my head, I am thinking of some grand visual that allows me to track what I have where and the key information about it. Right now I can see great information on my Unifi dashboard, but that doesn't track the UPB or Z-Wave devices managed through HomeSeer.

Has anyone found anything useful?

[kenm]

There's a reason why Stack Social doesn't allow "Best Way" questions. You're goimg to get a lot of opinions on this subject and you'll have to sift through them to come up with a plan.

My opinion is to allow HomeSeer to have visibility into as much as possible and make/keep good backups of your HS system. Since you mention Unifi specifically, make sure to take a periodic backup of your UDM or CloudKey configuration and save it to your HS system for backup. That might be a nice feature request for stefxx's Unifi plugin.

My other input is to have your system be as self-documenting as possible using HS notes for devices and events.

Finally, if you are anything like me, any notebook you try to create will be outdated within a week or so, due to system changes and laziness when it comes to updating documentation.

Edit: Unifi backup feature request made here.

[carlsnewton]

There's a reason why Stack Social doesn't allow "Best Way" questions. You're goimg to get a lot of opinions on this subject and you'll have to sift through them to come up with a plan.

My opinion is to allow HomeSeer to have visibility into as much as possible and make/keep good backups of your HS system. Since you mention Unifi specifically, make sure to take a periodic backup of your UDM or CloudKey configuration and save it to your HS system for backup. That might be a nice feature request for stefxx's Unifi plugin.

My other input is to have your system be as self-documenting as possible using HS notes for devices and events.

Finally, if you are anything like me, any notebook you try to create will be outdated within a week or so, due to system changes and laziness when it comes to updating documentation.

Edit: Unifi backup feature request made here.

Yeah, I realize the danger of asking for people's "opinions on what is best".

In my mind, I had pictured some utopian scenario of an all-encompassing product that brought all of this disparate information into one place for my personal satisfaction.