What Horotics actually does

Discovery & fingerprinting

From the moment it boots, Horotics reads the trunk for every active VLAN, builds a sub-interface for each one, and ARP-scans every subnet it can now see. Nothing needs pre-configuring.

Every device found gets fingerprinted on multiple signals at once, so identification doesn't rest on any single one:

• MAC OUI lookup for manufacturer
• SNMP sysDescr / sysObjectID for model and firmware
• TCP port signature (22, 80, 443, 1400, 5555, 8080…)
• mDNS/Bonjour and UPnP for devices that announce themselves

A confirmed match against the built-in Device Library, which is growing daily, adds the manufacturer logo, a product image, specs, and an "update available" badge if the firmware's behind — all without you typing a single model number in.

Self-heal

Offline devices don't just sit there generating alerts. If a device has a power source assigned, Horotics will try to bring it back by itself.

Two power-cycle methods, both fully automatic once set up: a UniFi PoE port toggle for anything on a UniFi switch, or a Gude PDU outlet cycle for anything plugged into one. Each attempt respects a cooldown and a maximum-attempts limit, so a genuinely dead device gets a clear alert instead of being endlessly rebooted.

Device hierarchy & alert suppression

Switches and access points fail too — and when they do, everything behind them looks offline at once.

Horotics builds a live map of what's connected to what — automatically, from UniFi's own topology data, standard SNMP/LLDP neighbour discovery, and switch forwarding tables — and uses it to tell the difference between "one device is actually down" and "the switch feeding twenty devices just died." You get one rolled-up alert, not twenty. Full detail on the monitoring page.

Network topology visualisation

Not an abstract node graph — a physical map that mirrors how the site is actually wired.

Internet at the top, down through the gateway, into switches drawn with their real port rows, end devices grouped by room underneath the switch they're plugged into. Every wire is anchored to the exact port it runs from and colour-coded by link speed, so you can see a trunk, a 100 Mbps bottleneck, or a dead port at a glance.

Ask AI

For the device that's technically "fine" but clearly isn't behaving — a second opinion, without sending your whole network out the door.

Ask AI assembles a brief from that one device's retained diagnostic history and its own log lines, strips anything sensitive (IPs, hostnames, credentials — never included at all), and sends it to a language model you've configured for an advisory read. It's opt-in per site, off until you turn it on, and it only ever suggests — it never touches the network itself.

Self-provisioning remote access

No port-forwarding, no router reconfiguration, no VPN client a programmer has to be talked through.

On first boot, the box dials out to the relay and provisions its own secure tunnel automatically. From that point, a remote programmer connects and gets real LAN-level access — including the Layer-2 broadcast reach that Crestron and Lutron discovery actually need — not a single forwarded port to one device. It feels exactly like being plugged into the rack on-site.

Virtual rack layout

The rack on your screen should match the one on the wall.

A Racks tab shows a real U-slot elevation for any location marked as a rack or cabinet. Equipment waiting to be placed sits in a tray with height and position fields; drag it in and hit Mount, and it renders in its real slot from then on — live on both the box itself and the cloud portal, so a client site's rack diagram is never a static drawing that drifts out of date.

Security & reliability, by default

None of this is worth much if the box itself isn't trustworthy.

• Login with optional two-factor authentication gates the whole web interface
• Every stored credential is encrypted at rest, keyed to that specific unit's own hardware
• A/B firmware updates with automatic rollback — a failed update can't brick a box on site
• Hardware-locked licensing ties a unit to the exact hardware and storage it was installed on