Can We Talk About Logging?

Installation Home Assistant OS
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Premise: HA is marketed to beginners as a plug-and-play solution loaded on a Raspberry Pi with SD card.

Reality: HA is very chatty. By default, every event and status change is written to the Recorder log. There are Supervisor logs, Core logs, Host logs, DNS logs, Audio logs and Multicast logs. A lot of integrations keep their own logs, or contribute a lot of entries to the above.

All this writing to an SD card is setting beginners up for failure.

Fortunately, there are ways to limit the damage by excluding things from Recorder. But that’s not easy for a beginner, especially if they have no SQL experience. And there’s really nothing they can do about all the other logs.

Again, we’re talking about a target audience with a simple system who are unlikely to want or need to upgrade to SSD, or install alternative databases.

Proposal: Develop a GUI-fied way to limit and manage what’s written to the log files.

I have some ideas on how this might work, but frankly I’d like to hear from those with more HA experience and knowledge.

3 Likes
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It is? As a user of home automation for decades I knew I was in for a steep learning curve with HA after reading about it, I switched because I knew that, as a developer, that this was going to provide me with a lot of options. If I was going to go with easy I would have done Smartthings or Vera.

Now, the more I use it the more I have come to realize that it’s even more complex, but I wasn’t under any impression that it was a beginners system - if anything I was under the impression that beginners would likely find this way above their head technically.