I’m trying to use Home Assistant but for the life of me I can’t see the status of my MySensors serial gateway anywhere. Is it still connected? Has anything been heard from the sensors?
There also isn’t a button to reload/restart the integration or no automatic recovery when it’s been externally reset. Has that really not been anticipated?
How is Home Assistant supposed to be usable if it’s so opaque and wants to much maintenance?
I am unfamiliar with the add-on or config for these MySensors, but have you looked in the dev tools, states tab?
Nope, I don’t see the serial gateway there.
Have you looked here in the documentation?
Personally I am new to ESP8266 etc, but I just started using them with ESPHome. It was super easy.
I don’t think the gateway itself is an entity, just the sensors/devices connected to the gateway. Do you see your sensors?
If you look at the docs it shows how to get full logs.
Well yes, but that’s irrelevant, most of them sleep for a long time. I want to know if Home Assistant is working properly. Plus the entities don’t have a “last_seen” attribute.
Thanks for the suggestion, but logs are rather useless in this context. I don’t think it makes sense to keep a keen eye on debug logs to maybe notice something that has maybe gone silent - it’s manual work that I literally want to avoid with home automation in general.
Yes, but it doesn’t have anything that helps with getting a better overview and failure-resistance. It’s very barebones.
Is there a watchdog type sensor available in the gateway mysensors code?
Well, yes, it is able to do radio sanity checks and my nodes have hardware hang watchdogs, but in some cases something else goes wonky.
Manually restarting HASS for a few hundred thousand times would probably take less time than debbuging some really infrequent yet fatal inability to recover 
I must say I have often thought about implementing some mysensors nodes but I find their documentation rather confusing, and I tend to go in a lot of circles on their website, and so far it hasn’t been a need as such. I had another look today and am a little knowledgable, although not necessarily wiser.
I was thinking maybe a mysensors device that just sends an update (maybe of the time so it always changes) every second, or however often you want to check. It would want to be powered and preferably wired to the gateway to eliminate wireless errors.
If the sensor doesn’t change every timeperiod, then the likelihood is that the gateway / HA link is broken, you get an alert and you can investigate, or restart the gateway.
Technically, the gateway can have sensors attached as well. I will attach something to it and see if I have a better idea what’s going on then.