Extended Diagnostics

Extended Diagnostics

Some hardware cannot be supported until somebody sees how it behaves on a real system. Nobody working on Device Sentinel owns one of everything, and reading a manufacturer's documentation is not the same as watching a device on a live network.

This screen is how you help, if you want to.

What It Does

Turning something on adds raw readings about that hardware to the diagnostics download you can take from the device page. That is all it does. It changes nothing about how Device Sentinel behaves, raises no alerts, and alters no detection.

Nothing is transmitted. The readings go into a file on your own system. They reach anyone else only if you download that file and attach it to an issue yourself.

How To Use It

1. Turn on the hardware you would like supported.
2. Wait 48 hours, so the readings cover normal behavior rather than one moment.
3. Download your diagnostics from the Device Sentinel integration page: Settings > Devices and Services > Device Sentinel, click the three dots, and select Download diagnostics.
4. Open an issue on the repository, attach the file, and say what you would like built.

What Appears In The List

Only hardware found on your system, and only where support is still being built. A house with no Z-Wave is never offered Z-Wave, and a house with an unsupported router is. When support for something is finished, it is removed from the list, so the screen never asks for data nobody needs anymore.

What Is Collected

Two things, and neither is the contents of what your devices report.

• A snapshot, refreshed as Device Sentinel runs: what each of your devices publishes right now, and what the registry holds about how to identify it.
• The shapes of what changes. A snapshot alone is not enough. The faults that have taken longest to find were only visible in what a device published at the moment something went wrong, which is a thing no single reading shows. So each distinct kind of change is kept once, with an example, and every later one of the same kind is counted rather than stored again. A hundred outages add nothing to the file; one device behaving oddly is kept.

Device names are included, because the rest of your diagnostics file already carries them and because a name is often what lets somebody match a reading to the problem you described.

Credentials, passwords, and tokens are never included, in this or any other part of the file.

Stopping

Untick the toggle and collection stops at once. What was already collected is removed at the next nightly fold, along with everything else Device Sentinel ages out.

Why This Exists

Device Sentinel supports what it has been able to test. Support for a router, a radio stack, or an integration usually stalls on the same thing: nobody involved has the hardware, and guessing from documentation produces support that looks right and fails on contact with a real system.

One person turning on a toggle for 48 hours has repeatedly been worth more than a week of reading.