How Do I Send A Notification Upon Device Becoming Unavilable/Unresponsive

[Insearchofth1ngs]

I’m in the phase of my home automation journey where I’m working on infrastructure and monitoring solutions on the health of my overall setup. My Z-wave network is currently 35 devices strong and I am about to add about 15 more devices. My network became a little finicky during the last expansion when I added more devices. After getting sick of devices becoming unresponsive I relocated my Z-Stick to a more central location and everything improved greatly.

With that said has anyone come up with an automation that’ll send you a notification or display on a dashboard what devices are unavailable or unresponsive? This would be an awesome tool to have for me in maintaining my network as the wife gets a little annoyed when things don’t work.

[123 (Taras)]

Unavailable / Unknown Entity Monitoring - Template Sensor

This template sensor will iterate the states object and return a count and list of entities that have a state of unknown, unavailable. This is a new version that incorporates a couple of new features such as ignoring entities for a time period and filtering entities based on a partial string match in addition to the entities declared in the ignored_entities group. The package has been moved to it’s own repository with updated documentation.

Simple example of a Template Binary Sensor that monitors the state of the members of a group.

Binary Sensor if any sensors in a group go Unavailable or Unknown

template: - binary_sensor: - name: Boiler Faults state: > {{ expand('group.chhw_sensors') | selectattr('state', 'in', ['unavailable', 'unknown', 'none']) | list | count > 0 }} To be verified: does a group’s state value change to unavailable if the state value of one of its members changes to unavailable? Answer: No. According to the documentation, all members of the group must be unavailable for the group’s state to become unavailable. The group state is unavailab…

[jazzyisj (Jason)]

If you’re specifically concerned with zwave devices you can use a variation of the template sensor @123 linked to that specifically monitors zwave devices along with an automation to automatically ping any zwave device that goes offline might work for you. I used to have a couple of devices that would go dead, this solved the issue.

Offline Zwave Device Sensor

jazzyisj/home-assistant-config/blob/428b51770f1302afa5ab8e4e6776c6268d36ba68/templates/template_zwave.yaml#L65

Automation to ping dead zwave nodes.

jazzyisj/home-assistant-config/blob/06c6b506203b8d9eee7fe6020b3258f696668c69/automations/zwave/automation_zwave_dead_node_ping.yaml

[PeteRage]

I monitor the health of my zwave devices. There are 3 aspects that I include.

1. Node Status - Line Devices - pretty simple - makes sure it’s in the Awake state
2. Wake-up Status - Battery Devices - did the battery device wake-up and check in. This is a latency calculation between now() and the last time the Node Status went to awake, with a threshold of 2.1 the configured device wake-up time (occasionally a device misses its wake-up)
3. Data Latency - some devices send data periodically (temperature every 10 minutes), this is a latency calculation between now() and the last zwavejs event for this CC, with a threshold of 2.1 the expected frequency.

To make it easy to setup, I have these packaged as reusable files that run through shell scripts to generate a set of HASS packages. So adding a new zwave device is a one liner in a script file.

I then use health in automations, for example, if I’m turning the dehumidifier on based on humidity and that humidity sensor isn’t healthy, then I’ll disable the dehumidifier and send an alert.

If wanted I can post the packages.

[jazzyisj (Jason)]

I’d be interested in seeing those packages, even if only for education purposes!

[PeteRage]

I put them up here:

GitHub - PeteRager/hass_templates