For some devices yes. Most Z-Wave devices will have quite a few entities, most of the time one of which will be the applicable door or motion binary sensor entity you are expecting to see… or a regular sensor entity for something like a temperature or lux meter… but sometimes you will need to create your own using the values from one of those other entities… I have a motion sensor I had to do this for, but all of my other devices properly generated the expected type of entity based on what type of device it is.
For your sensor, it’s possible someone has already had this question, and either it is supposed to be recognized, and is not…
I also read a few things about changing a “parameter” on the device…
or it’s a very basic template sensor that you need to create and once you make the first one, the others would be super simple…
is there a more specific model number for the sensor… ZW08 or something like that?
also as you mentioned you could customize the XML file so it is detected automatically, but how exactly to do that I would have to defer to some of our experts on the subject as I have never had to do that…