WTH doesn't devices that silently drop offline raise an issue or TODO?

Month of "What the heck?!"
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Just title. We often have automations that stop working silently, and also often the reason is a battery device, or zigbee/zwave that dropped offline. No issues, no TODO, no nothing. Sometimes they just disapear and need a new repair…

2

I would hate to get notifications just because someone has turned off a light switch (thus killing power you my smart bulbs).

Maybe just set up automations for devices you care about being offline?

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3

I was not thinking about notifications (agree, would be terrible!). But somewhere I could easy check (like issues or TODO).

Of course, would be awesome if, when solved, the issue / TODO to go away by itself. Otherwise it could be too crowd and probably useless…

4

I have set up two Automations:

  • If Battery becomes unkown/unavailable
  • If State doesnt change for xx Hourse

Then, as the Triggers, i put in my precious Devices.
This works for me.

Sure, in a perfect World the Administrator gets automatically a Notification. But tbh, for me there are many Things that need more Attention, especially if it is in comparison rather easy to set up those two Automations.

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5

Please share.

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6

Overall, I agree. Since I also have automation for Zigbee/Zwave and something specific for battery-powered devices, it looks more like something tech-savvy users could do.

Home Assistant is moving to be more easily used by everyone, and I was thinking that we should have something already backed in to deal with such problems. I mean, in my beginning with Home Assistant, everything was new, and I used to spend a lot of time trying to understand why something didn’t work. Sometimes, it was as simple as something offline (like, after a house cleaning, I accidentally disconnected a device USB cable).

Ultimately, I’d love to have a Reliability Dashboard or Health Panel with information like how often devices/integrations failed, dropped offline, wide-known issues, active service/community warnings, slow everything down/boot, and so on. That would help everyone choose devices based on reliability or, at least, prioritize actions/change based on this (I’ve made something simpler in this sense, but yet to bake statistics/history into it). But first things first! I believe the average and newcomers should easily find such features (devices offline), this WTH is not for advanced users.

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7

For deleted devices/integrations, we have Spook (awesome! but for advanced users)!
For offline devices, I’ve been using many tools. For example:

type: custom:auto-entities
card:
  type: entities
  title: Offline (top 5)
  state_color: false
filter:
  include:
    - state: unavailable
      integration: mqtt
  exclude:
    - entity_id: sensor.oral_b_*
    - entity_id: binary_sensor.*_update_available
    - entity_id: sensor.*_battery
show_empty: false
sort:
  method: last_changed
  reverse: true
  first: 0
  count: 5

Again, it requires HACS/MQTT add-ons and knowledge about how Home Assistant works. But it works pretty well, and it’s simple. I’ll work something different to create TODOs based on, for example, being offline for more than 3 hours, based on devices class, or even with include/exclude rules (again, an automation).

More examples I’m using / used to use:

8

No I would love to know if a household member shut off the power to my smart things or unplugged something. Otherwise how would you know they did. Or maybe a breaker popped for some reason.

9

I too would love to see this. I am victim to the dying battery device causing automation to fail issue.

Also some devices don’t ever report a 0 battery state they simply just aren’t there all of a sudden and are still reporting 20% or more battery level but don’t have a connection when they should trigger.

So maybe a poll feature for the network? Idk how that stuff functions so not sure if that’s a possibility.

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10

Love to see this too. Maybe add a setting to mark entities and integrations “Critical”, and have Home Assistant monitor those entities/integrations.

Perfect for alarm, leak, smoke etc sensors

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11

This is far from a solution, but you can already do this.

  • For battery levels, there are multiple ready made blueprints which will alert you once any device battery goes below a certain threshold.

  • For the 20% reporting while battery is dead, you can configure reporting intervals for all battery devices in the ZHA/Z2M integrations (if this is about a zigbee device). Default is usually set to 24h for both integrations - you can set it lower, but don’t lower it too much or it’ll increase battery consumption.

12

That actually seems like a really good use case! After guests have been, I often have to go around turning lights back on :grin:

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This has been discussed before, so I know there’s no one simple solution. Some devices I want to know about straight away, but some I really don’t want to know about ever.

I agree that this is something which is worth further consideration, particularly to make them more accessible for new users. I expect the challenge will be in finding an appropriate level which is basic yet useful for a beginner; but can be enhanced as users become more proficient.
Maybe basic “low battery” and “device dropped off wi-fi / ZHA” alerts, plus some user guides (a good learning opportunity for new users) to help implement more sophisticated solutions.

I personally made an automation to notify if my chest freezer (in the laundry downstairs) was running (consuming electricity through a smart power point) for unusually long (maybe the freezer’s lid was not shut fully); or not running for unusually long ( maybe the freezer’s motor failed or power socket was turned off). It took some experimenting to determine the allowable times for each automation.

To monitor my wi-fi and zigbee devices I setup a simple lovelace panel showing current RSSI or Wi-fi signal strength and “last updated” as Secondary information … but i don’t look at it often. This required me to add wifi_signal attributes to many ESPHome devices.

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14

Health panel sounds great. Why not make it’s own wth? I will vote.