Questions regarding best power consumption monitoring

Hello everyone,
I have a few sensors that have built in power monitoring (some Tuya switches and some Shelly relays) and I would like to monitor the power consumptions with HA.

From what I gathered here, people seem to be using Utility Meter even though the Utility Meter website only lists a very small percentage of people are using it.

Anyway, I was wondering what my options are.
The sensors all monitor internally as well, so they are already listing all consumptions including time. At the same time they are broadcasting current consumption.
Is it recommended to have HA monitor the current consumption and sum it up internally or simply use the consumption monitoring built into the devices? Although I did not really see any instructions that would point to the latter.
To me it would kind of make more sense to use the built in power consumption monitoring because the devices themselves are always recording whereas HA might need a restart or lose connection from time to time (especially when reading data from the cloud). So data on the device would be more complete.

And if I add multiple entities to the same cycle, are they still all recorded separately? I would like to be able to monitor them all individually and it certain dispkay groups, so I need to make sure that this information is not being lost.

I use a Shelly EM which has a total energy consumed sensor.

I use the utility meter integration to give me quarter year totals. If home assistant is offline for a bit, as soon as the next reading from the Shelly EM comes in the utility meter catches up.

@tom_l , are you using the Shelly integration, MQTT or the Shelly cloud service? I am currently not connected to the cloud and did not set to MQTT but am using the Shelly integration.

I’m using mqtt.

Did you have to manually add the energy consumed sensor?
I do not see such an entity for my Shelly 2.5 devices.

The Shelly 2.5 does not expose the total power by mqtt, https://shelly-api-docs.shelly.cloud/#shelly2-5-mqtt

You can get it with a restful sensor though, https://shelly-api-docs.shelly.cloud/#shelly2-5-meter-index