Exclusions and Muting

Exclusions and Muting

This configuration screen is for hardware you do not want to hear about. It holds two different tools for that, and the difference between them is the most important thing on this page.

Excluding discards. Muting silences. An excluded integration's devices are never watched, never learned from, and never recorded; what they had already recorded is discarded at the next nightly rollover. A muted device stays watched and goes on learning; only the judging and the reporting stop, so the moment you take the mute off, it is back with everything it knew. Where the data itself is meaningless, exclude. Where you want quiet about hardware you might care about again, mute.

Integrations to Exclude

The first list on the screen, and the exception to how everything else on it works. Every mute below keeps the record; this list is for integrations that publish measurements of nothing your house can be judged on. A device on an excluded integration is never watched, never learned from, and never recorded. It is set aside, the way service devices are, and the classification report names it as excluded.

The list starts with four:

• mobile_app: phones and tablets. They leave the house, they carry a cellular radio whose signal says nothing about your network, and their batteries are charged rather than replaced, so a battery series from one is a sawtooth that no discharge rule can read.
• fully_kiosk: wall tablets on permanent power, reading 100 percent forever.
• spook: describes Home Assistant itself rather than hardware, and escapes the service classifier because it does not mark its entries that way.
• ping: a probe that reports on every poll whether the target answered, so it can never fall silent while the integration is alive, and its devices duplicate hardware already watched through its real integration.

The list is yours. Any of the four can be removed, and any integration with watched devices can be added. Integrations whose every device is already set aside as a service device are not offered, because excluding them would change nothing.

What happens when you add one. The devices are set aside at once, so nothing new is learned. What they had already recorded is discarded at the next local midnight, not the moment you press Submit. Until that midnight, taking the integration back off the list restores it untouched. After it, taking it off starts that integration over, with no history and a fresh seven-day arming period.

Excluding is not muting. If an integration is on this list, muting it below does nothing, because there is no watched device left for the mute to act on.

Global Versus Per-Section Muting

Muting here means, "I do not care about this hardware at all."

If you only want to silence one kind of report for a device you otherwise care about, do not use this screen. Use that specific section's mute list instead. For example, a wall-mounted tablet that always reads as charging belongs on the Low Battery mute list, not here.

The Core Principle

Muting suppresses judgment and reporting, never observation.

Device Sentinel never treats "watched" and "muted" as opposites. Every device is monitored and its habits are learned. Muting a whole integration or a single device simply means it will not be reported. This is a deliberate design choice: it makes undoing a mute instant and free. The moment you un-mute a device, its full learned history is present; detection resumes immediately with mature statistics rather than starting a new learning period.

Because enforcement happens where the judging occurs, a globally muted device has no verdict worked out for it at all. It will never appear on the problem list, in any instant notification, or in the daily brief.

Where Muted Devices Appear

Even though they are silent, muted devices are not invisible. If you view the device telemetry file, described in The Diagnostic Reports, you will see every device listed. The STATUS column will read "Reported" for judged devices, and "Muted" for silenced ones, accompanied by a code indicating why: GLB for global, BAT for battery, SIG for signal, FRZ for freeze. GLB shows alone; the section reasons combine, so a device muted from two sections reads "Muted (BAT, FRZ)".

Some devices are set aside rather than muted, and set aside means something stronger: not watched at all. Three of the reasons are automatic. A device with no hardware to watch, such as a service entry or a cloud connection; a device disabled in Home Assistant, by you or by its integration, which cannot report at all; and a device with no entities registered, which has nothing that could report. A device you disabled is watched again the moment you enable it, and its learned history is still there.

The fourth reason is yours. Integrations to Exclude, at the top of this same screen, names integrations that should never be watched, learned from or recorded, because what they publish is not a measurement of anything your house can be judged on: phones that travel, wall tablets on permanent power, Spook, ping probes. That is a different thing from muting. Muting silences a device and keeps everything it learned, so you can bring it back at any time with its history intact. Excluding discards the record at the next midnight and starts the integration over if you later remove it. If an integration is on the exclude list, muting it here does nothing, since there is no watched device left to silence.

The classification report names all four reasons, so you can see which one caught each device.

The Three Muting Lists

Below the exclude list, the muting lists run from broad to narrow: Integrations, Labels, and Devices.

Integrations

This mutes every device owned by that integration. Note that hardware an integration merely sees, but does not own, is not caught. For example, a router integration that tracks a Wi-Fi camera's presence does not drag the camera into the mute list with it.

Labels

Devices and entities carrying these labels are muted. This is useful for triaging a large system as you go, because it is the one mute you can set without opening the Device Sentinel dialog. Apply the label to a device or entity directly from its own page in Home Assistant, and the mute takes effect here automatically.

Devices

These are picked directly. The selected devices will never be judged or reported.

How the Lists Interact

When you mute at a broader level and save, everything it covers disappears from the narrower lists below it. For example, if you mute an entire integration, its devices and entities will no longer appear in the device and label pickers because the integration already covers them.

Cascading to Sections

This behavior extends to the specific section screens. A device globally muted disappears from the Low Battery, Signal Strength, and Freeze Detection pickers entirely.