Best practice for monitoring connected esphome devices (and notifications)?

Configuration
1

Hi all,

Still pretty new to HA. I have about 20 esphome devices migrated, and have another 20 or so tasmota devices to convert. Summer has been a challenge so I’m not making the progress I was hoping for.

I would like to create a view that shows me the version of the esphome device firmware and whether the device is connected or not and perhaps sends an alert.

I’ve noticed, but haven’t totally researched how it happens, that Unifi Network links its sensors with the esphome sensors in the view. I imagine it is linking this information based on the MAC address. I assume I do not want to create a sensor in the esphome device firmware but instead leverage Unifi or ping or something else.

I would want to be able to iterate over all esphome devices and their settings (esphome firmware, unifi uptime timestamp?) to create a dynamic display.

What does anyone have that is working well and is easy to set up (as I have a lot of other more fun things I want to get to).

2

Try reading this Managing Offline Devices in Zigbee2MQTT — Home Automation Guy

1 Like
3

Make sure to include this component in all your ESP devices:

It should then be a simple matter of triggering on this sensor turning 'off'

This sensor is available for version:

These are simple entities cards with secondary info: last updated:

Screenshot 2024-08-15 at 11-01-14 Administration – Home Assistant
Screenshot 2024-08-15 at 11-01-14 Administration – Home Assistant1011×886 179 KB

You could also use the auto-entities custom card to not have to keep this up to date.

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4

Thanks @tom_l and @desean - these are both very helpful and I’m learning a lot of useful approaches.

Quick follow-up question with respect to auto-entities. I assume, given its name, that you can’t have it do something like:

show me all devices created by esphome, and display these entities if they are available?

5

Yes it supports templates and wildcards so if you name all your status sensors "<Device Name> Status" you can create a filter like this:

type: custom:auto-entities
card:
  type: glance
filter:
  include: 
    - entity_id: "binary_sensor.*_status"