Home Assistant & Grafana Integration

Home Assistant & Grafana Integration

Once your Meshtastic node is publishing to an MQTT broker, that data stream can feed home automation and monitoring platforms.

Home Assistant Integration

Home Assistant has a built-in MQTT integration that can subscribe to Meshtastic topics.

1. Navigate to Settings → Devices & Services
2. Click Add Integration and search for MQTT
3. Configure with broker address: mqtt.meshtastic.org
4. Subscribe to your node's topic tree, e.g., msh/US/2/json/LongFast/#
5. Create template sensors to parse position, telemetry, and message payloads from the JSON

With location data flowing into Home Assistant, you can create dashboards showing node positions, battery levels, and last-seen times, or trigger automations when specific nodes report in.

Grafana Integration

Grafana is commonly used for time-series visualization of mesh telemetry (signal strength, battery voltage, node uptime).

• The community maintains Prometheus exporter projects that scrape MQTT topics and expose metrics for Grafana to consume.
• Search GitHub for meshtastic prometheus exporter for current community projects.
• A typical stack: Meshtastic node → MQTT broker → Node-RED or custom exporter → Prometheus → Grafana.

Self-Hosted MQTT Broker

For production or privacy-sensitive deployments, run your own MQTT broker (Mosquitto is the standard choice) rather than relying on the public broker. This also enables TLS with your own certificates and username/password authentication.

# Mosquitto install (Debian/Ubuntu)
sudo apt install mosquitto mosquitto-clients
# Configure listener, TLS, and ACLs in /etc/mosquitto/mosquitto.conf