SimpliSafe very unreliable as of late

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I have been using Home Assistant for a little over a year now and have been using SimpliSafe for just as long. The integration has always been a little “wonky” and it would become unavailable at least 2-3 times per day. However, I never had any issues with arming or disarming the alarm either by clicking a button in lovelace, or through an automation. Lately, I find that I have to try to click the lovelace button 4 or 5 times before it performs the selected action and forget about automations being reliable. Thanks in advance for the awesome work everyone does on this project that allows me to have a truly smart home.

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Integration author here. :wave: You’re not alone: this is happening across the board. As best I can tell, their unofficial Cloud API is pretty flaky as of late: it’s not unusual for me to see multiple 5xx entries (which indicate a server error) in the logs on any given day.

Seems like there may have been an outage recently? https://reddit.com/r/simplisafe/comments/kbn1r5/simplisafe_outage/

Curious if you’ve updated to 2020.12.0 yet? I’ve put in some defensive code that may help.

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I did update yesterday and still seemed to have a few issues with arming and disarming, however they do seem to be fewer. My temporary solution seems to be to call the arm or disarm service multiple times in my automations. 5 being the magic number. This does however, on occasion, make the simplisafe voice sound like a bad radio dj.(“it’s the remix”):rofl: I will keep a close watch on it and update with anything I see going on. Thank you again for making the integration possible!

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Thanks for the intergration. I find the sensors very unreliable. The constantly go to unavailable in Home Assistant. I was going to use the indoor motion as triggers for automations ( nothing to do with the alarm), i.e turn on a light after sunset and a motion for example.
I set up in their app a secret and it appears their app sees it each time. The information is not passed reliably to HA?
In re-reading the docs, it looks like a Simplisafe notification should have been setup. I don’t have one set up. I guess if I did I could use this to trigger?

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See the comment above.

When you say “a secret,” I assume you mean a secret alert on a sensor?

Comparing the mobile app to the HASS integration requires some subtlety – there’s more to the story than “the mobile app works and the integration doesn’t.” Both use the same private, unpublished API – however, the mobile app is on-demand (meaning that it only requests an update when you manually force it) and the integration is recurring every 30 seconds.

From my tests, the integration (again, updating sensors every 30 seconds) will fail with 409 or 5xx response codes about 20 times in 100. I imagine that if you were to manually refresh the app every 30 seconds for 100 intervals, you would see a similar response error rate.

The HTTP response codes we receive indicate the upstream SimpliSafe services are failing sporadically – nothing we can do about it except hope that SimpliSafe is working to fix it.

Sorry, I’m not clear on what the question is?

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When you say “a secret,” I assume you mean a secret alert on a sensor?

Yes

In re-reading the docs, it looks like a Simplisafe notification should have been setup. I don’t have one set up. I guess if I did I could use this to trigger?

Sorry, I’m not clear on what the question is?

From the docs

SIMPLISAFE_NOTIFICATION events represent system notifications that would appear in the messages section of the SimpliSafe web and mobile apps. When received, they come with event data that contains the following keys:

I do not have a simplisafe_notification entity

Comparing the mobile app to the HASS integration requires some subtlety – there’s more to the story than “the mobile app works and the integration doesn’t.”

I am not comparing it the the home assistant mobile app. I am comparing it to the Simplisafe notification through their website. I get a notification sent each time one of the secret alerts are triggered. How do I see this same notification in Home Assistant from the integration?

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SIMPLISAFE_NOTIFICATION is an event, not an entity. You can use it as an automation trigger: https://www.home-assistant.io/docs/automation/trigger#event-trigger

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How do I see this event in Home Assistant? I looked in logs, history and development tools. Simplisafe is not captured there.

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Are you wanting to see what the event payload looks like? If so, the documentation outlines that: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/simplisafe#events

If you’re wanting to “watch” for an event in real-time, you can go to Developer Tools -> Events and use the Listen to events area to output these events as they occur.

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I would like to see the log file of the events. Why are they not captured?

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Home Assistant doesn’t log every event received by every integration. One thing you can do is set your SimpliSafe logging to DEBUG-level:

logger:
  default: info
  logs:
    homeassistant.components.simplisafe: debug
    simplipy: debug

…and you will see them. Be advised, however, that with DEBUG-level logs, you are likely to see a deluge of information; look for lines that contain New websocket event or New system notifications.

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What I was asking is a database entry. Then you could use logbook or history. I most likely said it wrong above. What I am trying to do is monitor a 97 year old with dementia. I have other sensors that I get notifications on. I wanted to use the Simplisafe one as a second one that the person has left the house. If not possible with the current setup, I’ll just add another sensor that can do this.

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You could write an automation that logs these events to the logbook (using the logbook.log service: https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/logbook#custom-entries).

An (untested) example might look like:

automation:
  - alias: "Log SimpliSafe events and notifications"
    trigger:
      - platform: event
        event_type: SIMPLISAFE_EVENT
      - platform: event
        event_type: SIMPLISAFE_NOTIFICATION
    action:
      service: logbook.log
      data:
        name: SimpliSafe
        message: >
          {% if trigger.event.event_type == "SIMPLISAFE_EVENT" %}
            {% set message = trigger.event.data.last_event_info %}
          {% elif trigger.event.event_type == "SIMPLISAFE_NOTIFICATION" %}
            {% set message = trigger.event.data.message %}
          {% endif %}

          📥 SimpliSafe Message: {{ message }}

You can use any of the data fields shown in https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/simplisafe#events.

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Thanks. This gets me closer. I still am missing many of the events that come directly from Simplisafe. I get the notification almost instantly to my phone. All do not show up in Home Assistant. I just had 5 messages from the simplisafe notifications and none showed up in the logs. I don’t think this is an issue with the app, it just is not reliable to use the sensors for anything thing else.

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What are examples of the events that you’re seeing in the SimpliSafe app, but not in Home Assistant. You mention sensors?

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Garage door open, (contact sensor) hallway (motion sensor). Both are setup as secret alerts. I see them all texted to my phone as well as in the simplisafe web app history. Missing a lot in home assistant. As a test I opened the door 5 times. All showed in simplisafe, none during the test showed up in Home Assistant. Sometimes they do show, other times they don’t. No idea why or why not?
Also when it does work, can I do a filter on the automation that you gave me as an example, to send me a message when i.e. the garage is triggered?
The automation made this in the log file

SimpliSafe 📥 SimpliSafe Message: Secret Alert: Motion Sensor Front Door Triggered

I see no way of filtering the log or having this to trigger a notification.

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The answer lies in the documentation I posted previously. Specifically regarding SIMPLISAFE_EVENT:

event_type , being one of the key fields automations might be built from, can have the following values:

  • camera_motion_detected
  • doorbell_detected
  • entry_detected
  • motion_detected

I only see these everything else can be tracked via state changes to the appropriate entities (e.g., I won’t fire an event when the alarm arms because you can monitor the alarm_control_panel’s state to get that information).

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Thanks for spending this much time helping me out. Hopefully I get there. When I do, I’ll post the automations and settings for others. So from your comments above, I can only see entry detected, not which entry?
I still am not sure what to do about the number of dropped notifications to HA. Just did another trial and 4 reached Simplisafe, 1 reached HA.

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I am also seeing that the timeline has a lot more entries from the secret alerts than are texted to me. Hard to have an integration work correctly when the company can not even handle data that it sends.

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I reset my alerts on the phone and it is now matching the simplisafe time line. For some reason it seems to be better in Home Assistant also.

SIMPLISAFE_EVENT

in the developers tools seems to work well as it catches all of the secret alerts.
Now can I use any of the responses

"last_event_type": "motion_detected",
 "last_event_info": "Secret Alert: Entry Sensor Garage Opened",
 "last_event_sensor_name": "Garage",

to trigger an automation on the specific sensor?