Alerts Component

I was in the process of setting up an automation to let me know when the garage door had been opened for a long time and was looking for some ideas on how to do this in the documentation when I ran across the Alert Component, which I have not seen before. Which, of course, is tailor-made for the purpose. However, I guess I am missing something because in the documentation the following example is given:

alert:
  garage_door:
    name: Garage is open
    entity_id: input_boolean.garage_door
    state: 'on'
    repeat: 30
    can_acknowledge: True
    skip_first: True
    notifiers:
      - ryans_phone
      - kristens_phone

What is not clear is what, exactly, is supposed to be put as the notifier. I know it.s not literally ‘ryans_phone’ or ‘kristens_phone’, but what do you list there? Does this follow the convention of other notifications for example:

- service: notify.gmail
  data:
    - title: 'Garage Door Open'
    - message: 'Garage door opened for 30 minutes'

Or is something else going in there?

In your notifier service example, you’d use gmail as the notifier in the notifiers section of your alert.

As Tinkerer says, it should be this:

notifiers:
  - gmail

The alert (text) will display what you have as the ‘name’.

My config is as follows:

alert:
  garage_door:
    name: Garage Door Is Open for 30 mins
    entity_id: binary_sensor.garage_door
    state: 'on'
    repeat: 30
    can_acknowledge: True
    skip_first: True
    notifiers:
      - telegram

Okay, so I set up the garage door alert with the following configuration. It follows the documentation verbatim with the exception of the notifiers which I changed to match my named notifiers. Yet, I get no notification. The intention was to get the initial notification when the garage door is opened/closed, which I got. Then I wanted an alert every 20 minutes after if the garage door had been left open but I did not get those.

alert:
  garage_door:
    name: Garage Door
    entity_id: binary_sensor.ecolink_unknown_type0004_id0003_sensor_69_0
    state: 'on'
    repeat: 20
    can_acknowledge: True
    skip_first: False
    notifiers:
      - simplepush
      - gmailtosms_a
      - gmailtosms_b

Just a follow up to see if anyone has any input as to whether or not I have my configuration for this set up correctly? So far, I have been unable to get it to work.

Do your console logs show anything useful? My alert setup is effectively the same and the last time I tested it, it worked fine.

Nothing at all. Nothing that it didn’t, nothing that it was configured wrong, just, nothing, LOL

I guess what is confusing for me, and I don’t know that it’s confusing per se, it’s just difficult to tell if I have the notifier set up correctly. And to just be clear on that point, if elsewhere, for example, in an automation I call a notification service: notify.gmailtosms_a to get notifications, with the alert, the notifier section would just contain the name ‘gmailtosms_a’, correct?

Is there any way I could test the setup with Services under the Developer Tools?

Yes, if your notifier is notify.gmailtosms_a then the notifier in the alert is just gmailtosms_a.

You can use the Services tab to test any service, select notify as the domain, and the service you want to test with a JSON formatted data block (like { "message": "This is a test" })

Okay, thank you, Tinkerer. That was what was a little unclear to me and I kept focusing on that because it was out of the norm from other notification configurations. Now that I got that ironed out I can look at other things. I ran the test and that went through. So I am not sure what is not right, but at least I can rule out the notification configuration thanks to you, which I greatly appreciate.

Now, on to see if I can get this to work.

So reading this thread I’m still confused. I am trying to set up the alert component to send an alert via the Twilio SMS component. But I’m very confused. In order for me to use the twilio_sms component to notify via the alert component I need to specify the target of the SMS message. Normally you would pass this along in an automation via the target parameter…

I am totally unclear however, using alert, how I can specify the target SMS number? The twilio_sms component does not accept target as a param.

Can someone please provide a working example of using alert and twilio_sms together?