Services should have state entity

Often there are instances where services that are installed fail to start, or are in different states;

“Initializing…”
“failed setup, will retry”
Or
Operating as intended

Short of going through logs or coding extensively, there is no way to ascertain if the service is up or down easily. This is particularly relevant for things like ZHA when it goes offline a series of devices go offline, they become “unavailable” but this doesn’t necessarily mean the service is offline, rather devices in the service are offline.

It would be helpful to have reference entities so as to introduce your own redundancy parameters. It seems this state is already kept as it is shown in the “Devices and Services” section but not exposed.

If we could check if the service is “up” we could then undertake notification activities or remediation steps. Helpful when watchdog isn’t enough, like a failed USB or the cloud service isn’t operating properly.