PING sensor changes?

Configuration
1

After this latest point-release update suddenly getting an alert that PING is being removed from YAML and made GUI-only.

Unfortunately this has the side effect what was neatly arranged in logical packages and clearly annotated with comments about what sensors were for which purpose or where the IP came from with YAML is now shuffled and jumbled together instead and have no comments to help tell which thing was supposed to be for what, making it really hard to find related things.

Is there some way to group the sensors in the UI so I can have them logically and restore comments about which was for what again?

Before:
Network Status package:

image
image304Ă—791 47.5 KB

esphome reboot when AP comes back online package:

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image529Ă—945 67.3 KB

Now:

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image687Ă—846 42.9 KB

I don’t even see any way to add comments back in with the GUI to help remember what random IP addresses came from to debug stuff later.

2

This is a side effect of “yaml → UI” transfer:

  • cannot add comments;
  • cannot use secrets, common “include” definitions;
  • cannot assemble functionality into packages - so cannot mass-manage functionality (disable a package, duplicate a package, move a package to another HA setup).

I am trying to use yaml as much as I can.
Have to move some code for integrations to UI.

2 Likes
3

Yeah, it seems like a really short-sighted thing to do. Makes it harder to use and harder to maintain, don’t know who thought this was a better way.

And as you say, is way harder to mass manage, being unable to easily copy, paste, or in some cases I’ve written scripts to generate YAML for a large number of similar sensors (e.g. my thermometers and cable modem signals) when there are dozens only slightly tweaked.

4

I totally agree and think it´s a very bad move to stop supporting YAML.
(E.g. I´m generating yaml-files with some tools.)

1 Like
5

I agree. I manage 4 different HA installation in vastly different locations. Each setup is almost identical and I can make site specific changes just by editing the secret.yaml or group.yaml. The automations are generic for all sites. I monitor a number of servers in each site using ping for availablity. Each server’s ip to be monitored is defined in the secrets file. Definition of the ping devices is in the configuration.yaml file and is the same for each site. With the move of ping to the gui I loose the ability to easily manage these HA instances. Currently ping sensors defined in yaml are automatically moved to the gui. I don’t understand why this cannot continue after 2024.6.0, in that way we have the best of both worlds.