You’re right. That’s the bit I was missing. I forgot about the device_attr() method.
Thanks for that. I’ll need to play with the template to get it where I want it for my desired use.
yeah, that’s what I was looking for.
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Actually I was just playing around with your template a bit but I think the issue is if the unavailable entity isn’t associated with a device (I have an MQTT switch that goes unavailable occasionally - like now) then the template for the switch portion will error because the ‘device_id()’ method won’t work if the entity has no associated device.
Here is how I solved that error:
.
.
{% for switch in states.switch | selectattr('state','eq','unavailable') %}
{% if device_id(switch.entity_id) != None %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
.
.
I removed the exclude entities for my testing but I think this should work if you add it back:
.
{% for switch in states.switch | selectattr('state','eq','unavailable') %}
{% if switch.entity_id not in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(switch.entity_id) != None %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
then you could add the light domain as well:
.
{% for switch in states.switch | selectattr('state','eq','unavailable') %}
{% if switch.entity_id not in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(switch.entity_id) != None %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% for light in states.light | selectattr('state','eq','unavailable') %}
{% if light.entity_id not in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(light.entity_id) != None %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(light.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
But again this will give you every device and not just those associated with the zwave or zigbee integration. I haven’t worked out a way to filter on just those yet.
----------EDIT----------------
I’ve done some more editing and I figured out a way to filter on only zwave & zigbee.
It’s not pretty and there may be a better way to do it to make it more efficient but as far as I know it should work.
Also in my playing around I noticed that adding entities by “name” might not always get the result thatr someone might want. I had a few of my devices that got a very generic name when I included them so getting a result like “Sengled G11-G13” isn’t going to help you get directly to the correct device. So you might want to investigate that part further. I started using “name_by_user” instead.
But here is the abomination template I came up with:
{% set result = namespace(offline_devices=[]) %}
{% for sensor in states.sensor | selectattr('attributes.device_class', 'defined') | selectattr('attributes.device_class', '==', 'battery') %}
{% if "unavailable" in sensor | string and not sensor.entity_id in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(sensor.entity_id) != None %}
{% if (device_attr(device_id(sensor.entity_id), "identifiers") | list)[0] is defined %}
{% if 'zha' in (device_attr(device_id(sensor.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] or 'zwave_js' in (device_attr(device_id(sensor.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(sensor.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% for binary_sensor in states.binary_sensor | selectattr('attributes.device_class', 'defined') | selectattr('attributes.device_class', '==', 'battery') %}
{% if "unavailable" in binary_sensor | string and not binary_sensor.entity_id in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(binary_sensor.entity_id) != None %}
{% if (device_attr(device_id(binary_sensor.entity_id), "identifiers") | list)[0] is defined %}
{% if 'zha' in (device_attr(device_id(binary_sensor.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] or 'zwave_js' in (device_attr(device_id(binary_sensor.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(binary_sensor.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% for switch in states.switch | selectattr('state','eq','unavailable') %}
{% if switch.entity_id not in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(switch.entity_id) != None %}
{% if (device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "identifiers") | list)[0] is defined %}
{% if 'zha' in (device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] or 'zwave_js' in (device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(switch.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% for light in states.light | selectattr('state','eq','unavailable') %}
{% if light.entity_id not in exclude.entity_id %}
{% if device_id(light.entity_id) != None %}
{% if (device_attr(device_id(light.entity_id), "identifiers") | list)[0] is defined %}
{% if 'zha' in (device_attr(device_id(light.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] or 'zwave_js' in (device_attr(device_id(light.entity_id), "identifiers")| list)[0] %}
{% set result.offline_devices = result.offline_devices + [device_attr(device_id(light.entity_id), "name")] %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{{result.offline_devices|sort|unique|join('\n')}}
it will only return zwave & zha devices that have a sensor or binary sensor battery device class or are a switch or light.
I hope it helps…even if you didn’t know you needed it… 
1 Like
Hey wow thanks for all of this 
Can you give me an example of this? Am curious, I don’t (yet) understand a switch that doesn’t have a device?
FYI I had a play around based on all the excellent work you did above. & I found a nice & very short way to get all offline devices, by integration.
The following code will report any offline Z2M/ZHA/ZWave devices,
(Note: I found when I switched to “name_by_user” that would fail for me on devices where it was “None”, so the below code includes error checking with fallback to just “name” when needed)
{% set result=namespace(offline_devices=[]) %}
{% set integrations=['mqtt', 'zwave_js', 'zha'] %}
{% for integration in integrations %}
{% for device in integration_entities(integration) | map('device_id') | sort | unique | list %}
{% for entity in device_entities(device) %}
{% if entity.startswith(('switch','sensor','binary_sensor')) and "unavailable" in expand(entity)|string %}
{# add error checking, in case name_by_user==None #}
{% set device_name=iif(device_attr(device,"name_by_user"), device_attr(device,"name_by_user"), "ERROR", device_attr(device,"name")) %}
{% set result.offline_devices= result.offline_devices + [device_name] %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}
{{result.offline_devices|sort|unique|list}}
So this code is conceptually much simpler than I had before
- First interate through a list of integrations (Zwave, Zigbee etc)…
- Then for each integration, get a list of all its devices…
- The for each device, get a list of all it’s relevant entities [sensor, binary_sensor, switch]…
- Then just check if any of those entities are offline…
Hopefully this “just works” when adding other integrations, like Tasmota or whatever - I don’t know, I dont have any of those…By grabbing devices first, we avoid cedge ases where an entity doesn’t have a device. (which I dont understand yet, I don’t have anything like that?)
Note: the above doesn’t grab “all battery devices” or the light domain etc, like the previous code from you and I does. I guess the ultimate blueprint would add all of this together Maybe with boolean checkboxes, so the user can choose what kind of devices they want scanned for…
I don’t personally have any battery devices that are not Zigbee or Zwave.
1 Like
Example Switch with no device I have is to turn my office fan on and off. It exists only as an entity related to mqtt.
I’m not sure if this is why, but I’m having this blueprint fail with ‘null’ as soon as triggered.
Also in terms of non-zigbee / zwave battery devices, phones or tablets for dashboards would be a common one.
Thanks for the further development. That’s way more compact than my first attempts.
Back in the day we didn’t have the concept of devices so everything was just entities. Not everything has been switched to the device schema so there are still lots of things that don’t have associated devices. As in the example I used above.
It’s an MQTT switch that I use to turn on and off a computer monitor and it is configured manually via MQTT switch integration:
mqtt:
switch:
- name: "Digital Picture Frame Monitor"
icon: mdi:panorama
state_topic: "frame/monitor/status"
command_topic: "frame/monitor/set"
availability_topic: "frame/monitor/available"
payload_on: "ON"
payload_off: "OFF"
state_on: "ON"
state_off: "OFF"
payload_available: "Online"
payload_not_available: "Offline"
qos: 0
retain: true
that’s just one example but there are many others still around. I have several command line switches that also have no associated devices.
I think that may be due to the concept of the two definitions of “device”.
A switch is (almost?) always associated with a physical device of some kind.
But that physical device is separate from the concept of a device in HA which is generally just a collection of entities associated with a physical device.
For example one of my command line switches I use to turn on/off my camera night vision LED. The camera integration does not provide a switch entity in the device (HA version) to control that camera device (physical version) LED so I have to manually create one. And we don’t have the ability to create devices ourselves or add entities to existing devices either. So it becomes a switch without a (HA version) device.
I saw that as well but hadn’t had the time to try to work out the solution.
I guess my solution was going to be to go thru all my devices and make sure they all have “name_by_user” so I don’t get the above example generic “Sengled G11-G13” device name.
It’s ironic that I had just started working on this issue a couple of weeks ago when one of my zigbee plugs died and I didn’t figure it out for a few days. It runs a hot water heater recirc pump that isn’t used all the time so I didn’t notice right away that there was no immediate hot water at the tap. I got the notification working as I wanted it but as I mentioned it’s not easily maintainable.
Thanks again for your work (and collaboration) on this.
Tho I’ll still add the light domain as well to your template since I have some zwave and zigbee bulbs.
Thanks @kyemacdonald. The “null” failure is likely because that switch doesn’t belong to a Device.
Clarification: This is a physical switch right? That you want to get notified if it goes offline? Or is it some sort of virtual switch?
The reason I ask is there are two ways to handle this, we can either have the automation “ignore all switch entities that are not part of a Device” (thanks to advice from @finity) The other option is: if a Switch Entity is offline, and is not part of a Device, then I can just return the Entities name, instead of the “non-existant Device name”.
I don’t have anything like this, so I need advice from you two on how best to handle that kind of case…
In the meantime, FYI here is my earlier blueprint, basically the same except it returns Entities instead of Devices, so it should work for you now.
(I found this behaviour a bit annoying, if one Physical Device, with 5 sensors, fell off the network, then I would 5 notification lines on my phone instead of one - (or a long rambling list from spoken from Google Nest) - just saying the device name makes more sense, for me)
Thanks for all that info I understand these switches now - they are still physical devices.
Question: when these kind of switches are offline, I can assume you would still want them reported? I.e would this logic make sense to you: “If one or more offline entities belong to a HA_Device, then just return that device name, but if the Entity doesn’t belong to any HA_Device, then just return that Entitys name instead”?
Ya it might be nice (in an ideal world) to extend the blueprint with some boolean checkboxes, so people can choose domains as suits their use case? i.e Checkboxes for domains: Zigbee, ZWave, AllBattery Devices, Lights etc
Would make the code in the blueprint a “fair bit more spaghetti” though. I gotta say I find this coding in HA/Yaml/Jinja really complex compared to e.g Python. It all seems so janky and fiddly to me
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I think that would be generally the case.
But there is already a thread for a generic “report any unavailable entity no matter the source” that’s been around for a while. And I used that for a bit but it was too generic so it became less useful since it reported too many things that I didn’t really care too much about.
Since I don’t use blueprints I can use the building blocks from the blueprints for the things I need a normal autoamtion to do. That way I can modify it for myself as needed.
My example isn’t a physical switch. It’s a command sent to a Sonoff RF Bridge that causes the bridge to broadcast that signal. The RF Bridge is a device in it’s own right, but commands sent to it are just entities I create and aren’t attached to any physical device (in HA terms).
From my perspective I don’t need to be notified if this mqtt switch is offline, as the only way it is offline is if HA is offline.
This was posted on the HA subreddit a few hours ago. I thought it could potentially be another approach - https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/1axg6mj/template_share_for_devs_how_to_get_all_offline/
Hi, is it possible to include smart lamps that went offline?
My lights are basically powered by mains switches installed in the house that normally switch a conventional lamp on/off and sometimes my wife or kids accidentally swithes off the mains switch that powers the smart lamp causing the automation cannot swith the smart lamp on.
Getting a alert on my phone I can recover the issue.
Whenever I try to run the automation, it never actually runs. In looking at the home-assistant.log I see this error:
2024-03-08 18:46:10.101 ERROR (MainThread) [homeassistant.components.automation.offline_sensors] Error rendering variables: TemplateError: Must provide a device or entity ID
I did not add any sensors to exclude and was just running the automation manually after creation. Any ideas? This is a bit over my head!
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This blueprint (mistakingly) assumes that every Sensor belongs to a Device. (which is true for my home, but not true for everyone.
This this error is likely happening because you have some e.g a sensors or switch entity, that does not have a parent device.
I’m aware of the issue, and will release an updated blueprint that will fix the issue for you, hopefully next week. Thankyou for the feedback.
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Thank you so much for the explanation and working on a fix!
I’ve had to remove the battery device class filter out of the excludes block. For some reason the notification includes my WLED controller (which is currently offline) but since it’s not actually a battery device I’m unable to add it to the excludes filter. I’d prefer to just have a longer list of entities in the excludes section and have the ability to filter out whatever I’d like.
thanks for the BP, it works great.
But I have one note.
Via NabuCasa I have integrated my 8 Alexas to use them as Media Player.
Your BP reports all 8 Devices as offline and I can’t put them on the ignore List.
After some research I found, that each device has 2 switches, which are both unavailable. I think that’s why they are reported offline.
These switches get activated if there is music playing.
The same problem is with my Philips TV integration, which gets reported, because the switches are not available, if the TV is off.
So for now, I deactivated these switches, but I would be awesome If you could implement the possibility to exclude devices, like alexa/media Player.
tnxs, gz Stefan
2 Likes
for me it doesn’t work either - I am getting following warning - WARNING (MainThread) [homeassistant.helpers.template] Template variable warning: ‘offline_devices’ is undefined when rendering ‘Folgende Geräte sind offline: {{offline_devices}}’
So a notification was sent to the HA app but just the text “Folgende Geräte sind offline:” - nothing else. Any advice what I am doing wrong ?
It “works” for me, except that the unavailable device it lists is just the generic manufacture name and not the friendly name. So among my dozen motion sensors, for example, I don’t know WHICH one is dead. Not too helpful.
hi, just checking back in to see if you had time to work on an update?
thank you!
Hi, just forked it to have friendly_name.
You can just use [state_attr(sensor.entity_id, “friendly_name”)] %} (line 49) to get it
You can import the fork to your HA instance using this url: Home Assistant Blueprint: Low battery level detection & notification for all battery sensors · GitHub
My report always shows my “Hue Bridge” is offline which it isn’t. The “Hue Bridge” is a device only without a similar entity. Hue Bridge is NOT even a battery device.
Excluding it (Device) doesn’t work either although I’m not sure what your device disclaimer means.