I’m relatively new to HA and still in the process of migrating devices. My expectations might change as I become more familiar with HA, but I expect more new users will have a similar experience as me.
The scenario:
Because of a configuration change in MQTT, many devices were duplicated. I had to remove the devices which were offline one by one. This process would have gone faster if I could see the timestamp of the last communication of each device. This got me thinking about the following improvements.
I’m aware that we’re not supposed to include multiple improvements in one topic, but I see this as a general request to improve the device management with some suggestions on how to achieve this.
Proposed improvement: Show “last message received” in devices menu.
In configuration > devices, instead (or in addition to) showing the battery state of the devices, also show the “last message recieved” timestamp of a device. This would be helpful to see if devices are working as expected.
In addition to showing the last message recieved, sorting and filtering the list of devices (on name, area, integration and status) would also be really useful.
Finally, a time-to-live threshold or ping can useful to determine if there is an issue with a device.
If there are better ways to keep track of the status and health of devices, I’d love to know.