WTH does home assistant not proactively tell me when something is not working

Month of "What the heck?!"
1

Editing to remove some references I thought would help, but they are causing confusion.

I routinely wonder: " why did that automation not fire?" Only to realize that the sensor it was relying on had been offline for 3 days for some unknown reason. Or “why is my temperature graph of the basement missing data for the last 2 weeks?” You guessed it… The sensor was showing up as “unknown” and I had no idea.
When this happens…it can be incredibly annoying

There are community addons that can help, but it feels like this is something that should be in core.

2

In the case of Spook, Frenck explains why in the final paragraphs of the Background and History.

In other cases, the reasons are often that the original developers aren’t interested in having them in core because they want to more flexibility when it comes to releases or methods.

3

Haven’t needed Watchman since trying Spook. That would be redundant.

Spook is Frenk’s test bed. What you see in there may eventually make it to the core.

4

Watchman and - even more - an extensive unavailable/unknown/other problematic states monitoring and notification automation are taking care of that issue for years. If I once find out how to discover new logged repair issues, that would make an extensive monitoring. Why isn’t it in core? Well, that’s the better question maybe.

5

I have been struggling for years to find an elegant way to be notified when one of the sensors becomes unavailable without the need to list each every one. I did not even manage to get this on a card so I could at least see the problematic ones.

6

*Both are states, some Native card Can/Does Show State, (hint: Visible in Dashboards)
*Native Automations/Templates can serve the same purpose
*HA, can not reed Your Mind, but it does log Errors, Event’s etc
So basically Most of your “Needs” is Natively Covered, You just have to decide What You see in Your Dashboards, and which Notifications You Want/Need And How
And if using the “Visibility” Tab, available in many Native Cards, it becomes more “Flexible”

7

I guess to me this still comes down to wanting something native and simple. What i would love is a system that worked something like this:

Enable this new feature if you want to be notified if any entity ever goes offline/unknown. (maybe this could go into “repairs”? i dont know if that is the right spot.)

right off the bat, you will likely be notified of a number of entities in those states. you would get to remediate them, and then be given the easy option to “ignore” the rest. then you would be in a steady state where you are confident things will work as expected. in my case, remediation was a mix of deleting old entities from experiments, power cycling some devices, and and plugging a device back in that was unplugged in my garage.

if something goes offline for a good reason, ( i unplug a lamp to re-arrange a room to do some painting) then i would love to be able to ignore that issue for a day/week/etc…

maybe a lux sensor on a device starts acting up and routinely shows up as unknown, i get to choose to troubleshoot that device, maybe buy a replacement, or decide that i dont care about that light sensor at all, and i would disable the entity, or simply permanently ignore it from this alerting if i wanted to keep the entitiy for some reason.

For me, i have 2000+ entities, and im only ignoring ~100 of them. if any of the remaining 1900 entities ever go offline/unknown, someone in the house is probably going to have a bad experience with HA.

to be clear, i dont want to have to look at a dashboard to find issues, the main goal of this WTH is for the system to be proactive and easy to use. (and that means not having to write or re-use someone elses complex yaml+jinja)

to sum it all up, i know there are ways to to basically get what i want here with enough tinkering, but my point is… why isnt it there by default? If someone spends the time/money/effort in setting up a smart home device, I think we can bet that they want to know if it isnt working,