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Maintaining a smart home and its devices is no small feat. Ever since I chose Home Assistant as my go-to automation software, my smart home ecosystem has steadily expanded. Over time, that growth also brought new troubleshooting headaches, which are very time-consuming.

To save time and effort, I deployed a bunch of Docker containers to solve common smart home problems. These containers have been a game-changer, serving as a Swiss Army knife for diagnosing and maintaining my smart home devices. I already use Portainer to manage containers and Watchtower to keep them updated. Beyond those, here are some obscure Docker containers I use to solve smart home problems and make a significant difference.

MQTT Explorer

Visual debugging of MQTT messages

Many smart devices that support MQTT can misbehave, and it’s difficult to diagnose the issue without deep-diving into the logs. After getting familiar with the MQTT Explorer desktop tool, I decided to run it as a Docker container to troubleshoot smart devices remotely when I’m away from my computer. Monitoring smart devices over the MQTT protocol becomes much easier thanks to MQTT Explorer’s tree view, which visualizes the messages passing through the MQTT broker in Home Assistant. Beyond this container, I keep a MQTTUI container handy to visualize the MQTT topic network graph and analyze the message history when debugging the complex interactions.

MQTT Explorer

MQTT Explorer is a MQTT client to control, manage, monitor, and troubleshoot the smart devices and system that use MQTT protocol.

Ofelia

For testing and validating automations

While Home Assistant’s built-in features to craft automation are quite powerful, some automations still fail to trigger as expected. To properly test and validate complex automations, I use Ofelia, which lets me schedule jobs or trigger automations manually through API calls. Unlike cron jobs, this container gives me the flexibility to manually schedule when and how to trigger automation, without waiting for specific conditions. For example, when my automation for evening lights refused to turn on a bulb, I discovered that the switch’s state was randomly reported as off. Most simple “set and forget” automations work flawlessly, but the complex ones require extra care, especially those depending on time, presence, and multiple triggers. Luckily, Ofelia integrates neatly with Node-RED, which I often use to craft complex automations in Home Assistant.

Ofelia

A modern job scheduler container for Docker enviroments.

NetAlertX

Alerts for new and unknown devices

The NetAlertX container scans my home network for new and unidentified devices, which is useful since my family often adds inexpensive IoT devices. The container also tracks when existing devices change their IP addresses or Ports to monitor their behavior. A record of random disconnections and reconnections usually helps me fix the connectivity issues with the smart devices. These records have helped resolve connectivity issues. In a way, it helps manage the smart device inventory on the network through its active scanning behavior. When a new rogue IoT device appears on the network, or an existing one drops off, I get notified instantly. For passive scanning, I often use the WatchYourLAN container, which uses ARP scanning and offers a slightly more polished interface.

NetAlertX

NetAlertX docker container offers enhance security with real-time alerts for the smart home devices and other hardware.

NetShoot

A CLI-friendly container for network troubleshooting

NetShoot is a command-line-powered container with classic network diagnostics tools, such as tcpdump, traceroute, iproute2, net-tools, and more. That’s why it’s become my go-to container for diagnosing networking problems with other containers. It can inspect VLANs too, which is handy since I’ve been trying to keep my smart devices on a dedicated network segment. When DNS resolution issues with smart devices cropped up, this container helped me confirm the problem, and I switched to Unbound DNS for my home network. By default, it creates PCAP files, which I analyze further in a Wireshark container.

Netshoot

Netshoot is like a swiss-army knife container to troubleshoot network issues of other Docker containers.

Beszel

Overall monitoring of other containers

Using Home Assistant in Supervised mode was causing my Raspberry Pi to crash frequently, so I switched to a bare-metal installation of HAOS on a Pi 4. Ever since I started using Beszel to monitor CPU, RAM, and storage usage more closely, it has helped me resolve frequent crashes. Beszel helps me keep an eye on system status. Besides, I configured it to alert me when Pi’s temperature crosses an alarming threshold. In the past, I ignored those system details and was left wondering why automations failed to trigger or why smart devices became unresponsive. With Beszel, I can now monitor my Home Assistant host and all other containers from a unified dashboard.

Beszel

Beszel is a lightweight server and container monitoring utility that can be used to track multiple servers via a single dashboard.

Making a smart home reliable, one container at a time

Running these lesser-known Docker containers is helping me save countless hours of troubleshooting, rather than a wild goose chase. Initially, I ran them individually, but now I deploy them using Docker Compose. With these containers, my smart home problems are nearly gone, making them more reliable. Undoubtedly, I needed to use them manually to diagnose network reliability and stability issues with IoT devices. Home Assistant remains at the center of my smart home, and these containers serve as extra arms to monitor the health and performance of the smart home ecosystem that I continue to expand.