Event Entities: Where are they?

In the release of 2023.8, one of the key features added was the Event entity. I have a sizeable number of Zigbee devices integrated via Zigbee2MQTT, but I don’t see Event entities for any single one of these devices.

Am I missing something? I just upgraded to Z2M 1.33.0-1, and I’m currently running 2023.8 HAOS. How do I get these entities?

Where did you see that z2m has adopted this?

I assumed that because Z2M integrates device to HA via MQTT, and MQTT supports Event entities, that I would see them in my HA instance.

Assumption is the mother of error.

Great, thanks. Super useful. /s

Just to summarize, Zigbee2MQTT will directly have to support event entities, and the fact that these entities are supported by HA → MQTT is not enough?

MQTT is nothing more than a communication protocol.

It’s the responsibility of whatever uses the MQTT communication protocol to implement an Event entity. For example, the MQTT Event integration creates an Event entity that can communicate via MQTT.

Similarly, it will be up to the Zigbee2MQTT project to implement Event entities.

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And this is not a positive data point (no reply to a discussion about it from July)

However I am not sure what problem event entities solve. You can easily automate on z2m events generated by buttons.

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Understood, thanks for clarifying. I assumed that the event data was already carried by way of recognizing an action, and HA was doing the work of translating those to Event entities. I did not realize that this is a 1:1 between Z2M and HA.

Thanks!

Zigbee2MQTT creates entities in Home Assistant (such as light, switch, etc) via Home Assistant’s MQTT Discovery feature. It’s now also possible to create an event entity via MQTT Discovery.

There is now an experimental implementation in Z2M dev. To enable it, you have to set homeassistant: {experimental_event_entities: true} in Z2M’s configuration.yaml.

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Coming back to this. I upgraded to 2.0.0 and enabled this setting:

homeassistant:
  enabled: true
  legacy_entity_attributes: false
  legacy_triggers: false
  experimental_event_entities: true

But nowhere Im seeing any event entities being generated. Also after pressing the Aqara wireless switch. Im on HA 2024.7.2. What am I missing?

Did you restart the addon after changing the config?

Im not using the addon, Im using Docker for Zigbee2MQTT. But it appears I needed to upgrade to the latest HA. It works in version 2025.1. Now I have a new issue and that’s the missing “action_group” (next to action) for my MiBoxer remote. For that, Im simply reverting to the good old mqtt triggers:

  - platform: mqtt
    topic: zigbee2mqtt/study_remote

You should not need HA 2025.1, there was something else going on (assuming you were not a year or more behind).