WTH lets upgrade History Graphs

Month of "What the heck?!"
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Missing history zoom functionality had been already one of the top 5 WTH in year 2022. Being able to analyse your history data in a fast and efficient way is one of the key elements for a home automation system. Hopefully we will see this one day in the core (custom history Explorer card shows it is possible). Thank you :slight_smile:

Link to old WTH can't I zoom in or out on history graphs - #19 by vision2003

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There is the quite mature history-explorer-graph, unfortunately not developed any further.
But if you’d ask me - this is how a standard, built in graph display should look like.

2 Likes
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Webrtc was added to the core, which was a great decision, the same thing should be done with history explorer. Analysing data is a key functionality, on other platforms like openhab dynamic history view is standard since a long time. Keeping thumbs pressed!

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I’d always welcome if anyone in our community can help replace our current chart.js with something that allows browsing through time (and also less ugly).

6 Likes
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I think this post is making the same mistake as the original one from 2022, which is just focusing on zooming in/out of the history, what I think is needed is a completely revamped history, like the one in alexarch21’s project (GitHub - alexarch21/history-explorer-card: A card for Home Assistant Lovelace for exploring the history of your entities interactively and in real time.), unfortunately abandoned, although completely functional in the SpangleLabs fork I’m currently using (GitHub - SpangleLabs/history-explorer-card: A card for Home Assistant Lovelace for exploring the history of your entities interactively and in real time.)

If you try it you can completely forget about the tedious and not very functional original Home Assistant history, this work is incredible and it’s just how the HA history should look like

7 Likes
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Like @juanmijm said - there is an modern, intuitive, ressourcefriendly, flexible Card out there. After the Creator unfortunatly left the Community, he opened it on the MIT Licence, so there is no Need to reinvent the Wheel. Probably catch some breaking changes.

1 Like
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There is another post very similar to this one and it is a shame to divide efforts and votes between two:

Please vote in both guys!

1 Like
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Hi.

Good idea that I would like to support with my vote :slight_smile:
The fact that there are now several (6) current WTH topics specifically dealing with suggestions and good ideas for improvements to the history graph, shows that it is effectively time to bring out something new and more performant.

I have also created a WTH topic to this theme:

And here are another 4 actual WTH topics on the same theme:

So, vote diligently and hope for a new history graph :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Hi, these days I mess a lot with history graphs.
They so useful for troubleshooting or maybe creating a tailored automation for custom device.
The control of time seems to be very outdated. The life will be so much easier if we could control this on some Easy manner. Idea came to my head if we could have a two knobs like in the old oscilloscope And by turning them, we could play with the time and shift the graph from left to right, this will be awesome. Olso make some nice interface we could rename it from History to Scope for example.

1 Like
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Totally agree! Have a look at custom history explorer. It’s been out there for a long time, and I can’t imagine working with the standard history graph again.
For me, everything needed is (almost) already there, and highly configurable as well. This is how a history graph needs to look and feel like.

A proper revamped history graph replacing this outdated would be awesome!

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I’ve been complaining (to myself) about the Home Assistant history for a long time, it’s something that I don’t understand how it can still be so bad (despite the latest changes and improvements that have been applied), it’s really tedious and frustrating to look at something there, almost forcing me to use Grafana or other means for it (which is also very tedious to configure, but at least it’s more functional)

As I was already fed up a few days ago I started to investigate how I could improve this, then I discovered this project:

Which has been abandoned, but I’ve used a fork that works perfectly continued here:

  • Before putting this post, I’ve seen some other ones that talked about improving some aspect of the history, such as being able to zoom, but I’m opening a new one because I think that what needs to be improved is much more, what we need is a totally renewed history, just like the original project from alexarch21

Searching a little more I found this old post from 2022, in which there was already a comment talking about alexarch21’s project:

I see that the post currently has 421 votes and a lot of people interested in this, but unfortunately it is an old post and already archived.

2 Likes
12

Dear developers (hope this will be read and responded by one of the developers):

WTH: I have never understood in Home Assistant till today is the poor implementation of the device value history graph function. It still seems to be underdeveloped (prehistoric) compared to the rest of all great monthly released Home Assistant features.

To me the history graph or data tables seems to be one of the key functions to read and interpret our smart home data but it’s now too basic and fails often. Please take a look at domoticz how they did this. Just to get an impression.

What’s in my opinion could be improved in favour of the majority of Home Assistant users?

  • Zoom in/out (pinch/scroll to zoom on IOS/scroll to zoom to decrease/increase the graph time scale.) Now users must make too many steps and many clicks for selecting for example the last hour of received data. Unfortunately totally unusable for daily analyse of entity values.
  • Make it possible to point at any position above the graph line to show the data. Now on IOS it requires you to EXACTLY touch the plotted graph line to show the values. This is terrible. Even worse: When you want to see the value in a graph the shown values are exactly displayed under your finger tips. I now need to redo my touch selection min. 5 times to make sure it shows the correct point in time and I touched really the lowest value. It’s not usable like this and so not user friendly.
  • Make it possible to show with one button click the RAW historic data in a table. Such as time and value in per row.
  • Make it possible to sort values in the displayed data table eg. the averge/highest/lowest, descending/… in last day, last hour
  • Make it possible to choose a second/third sensor the present two or more values in one chart such temperature/humidity/pressure/other sensor data.
  • Make it possible to show different graphs such as BAR charts and other.
  • Any other of the forum users has a better idea?

Your respond to this request is much appreciated. Thank you so much in advance.

6 Likes
13

There is another post very similar to this one and it is a shame to divide efforts and votes between two:

Please vote in both guys!

14

Hi.

Good idea that I would like to support with my vote :slight_smile:
The fact that there are now several (6) current WTH topics specifically dealing with suggestions and good ideas for improvements to the history graph, shows that it is effectively time to bring out something new and more performant.

I have also created a WTH topic to this theme:

And here are another 4 actual WTH topics on the same theme:

So, vote diligently and hope for a new history graph :slight_smile:

2 Likes
15

Searching HACS doesn’t appear to find this card…? Has it been removed from the default repositories?

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Add a custom repo

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Very happy to, but didn’t want to if it was unnecessary… The Github readme states: " The history explorer card is now part of the default HACS Home Assistant Community Store. This is the preferred way to install this card.", without mentioning the need for a custom repository.
Thanks :slight_smile:

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Then why posting this? )

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At the risk of going completely off topic! My thought process was:

  1. Read about the integration, thought it looked interesting, investigate further
  2. Read the Github readme, notice it’s a fork, notice it says “default HACS”
  3. Search HACS, not found
  4. Wonder if the integration had previously been in HACS but had been removed for some reason?
  5. Asked the question

I hope that makes my brain process clearer… I should, perhaps, raise a documentation issue against the Github repo…?

Thanks :slight_smile:

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The original history-explorer-card was archived and was removed from HACS.
A fork of this card seems to be not added yet to HACS, a custom repo should be added.

3 Likes