I have a functional HA installation with several integrations. One of them is MQTT, and species discovery.
I have a bunch of devices that send their discovery (and state) information via MQTT - all this works fine.
While extending my monitoring program, I wanted to test several edge cases - one of them was for a device that is available, then becomes unavailable (it breaks for instance) and finally is removed from the test pool (for instance I am getting rid of that broken switch).
In order to simulate that:
- I plugged in a plug that was discovered via MQTT and which I configured in HA. It worked great.
- I then unplugged it to simulate a fault. It switched to
unavailable
is HA (and alerts were raised in my monitoring). Still great. - I then wanted to simulate a “device removed” by switching off the “activate device” in its UI-based popup:
So far, so good the device does not appear anymore in the REST API response.
And now the problem: I cannot bring that device back to life.
I switched it back to “available” in the popup above (or clicked the blue “activate” button). The device itself seems to be fine, but its entity is not:
The highlighted red message means “this entity is currently not available”.
It has not been for a day now.
How to bring it back to life (I will ultimately delete the device and make it re-discover itself, but I would like to understand how the switch in the UI works)