FAQ and Troubleshooting

FAQ and Troubleshooting

Getting Started

1. Do I have to configure anything to get started?
2. How is this different from other freeze, unavailable, and battery automations and blueprints?
3. What should I globally exclude?
4. How do I set up email?
5. What is still not built?
6. What is next?

How It Works

7. Why does it watch devices instead of entities?
8. What are gaps?
9. What is dwell?
10. What is the difference between Battery: Low and Battery: Falling?
11. Will it survive a restart or reboot?
12. Will this slow my system down or cause lag in my automations?

Understanding the Numbers

13. Why is Devices: Watched lower than my device count?
14. Why is Devices: Learned zero, or low?
15. Why does Status say Learning?
16. Why is a healthy device showing a signal dwell number?

Troubleshooting

17. I excluded something by accident, will it have to be re-learned after I un-exclude it?
18. A device shows as "not reported". What does that mean?
19. A dead device is not showing in the Device: Frozen count.
20. A battery is one percent above my threshold and still flagged.
21. My Zigbee coordinator went down and the problem list filled with dozens of devices. Is that a malfunction?
22. Every MQTT device went unavailable at once. What happened?
23. The log says a notification service was not found.
24. The house lost power. What happens when it comes back?
25. How do I show the brief or the signal chart on a dashboard?
26. Something looks wrong. What do you need from me?

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Getting Started

1. Do I have to configure anything to get started?

No. Install it, add it, and it starts watching every device immediately with pre-configured defaults. Two things are worth doing on day one: press the three enable buttons on the device page, and tell it where to send alerts on the Notifications and Daily Brief screen.

2. How is this different from other freeze, unavailable, and battery automations and blueprints?

Automations and blueprints watch a list of entities you maintain, against a timeout you guess at. Device Sentinel watches every device automatically and learns each one's own reporting rhythm, so a chatty motion sensor and a sleepy door sensor each get a freeze window that fits them. There is no list to maintain and no timeout to guess.

3. What should I globally exclude?

Anything you do not want reported: phones, tablets, and watches (they leave the house and sleep on their own schedule), network presence trackers, and TVs or media devices that nap. Service entries and cloud connections are already set aside automatically. When in doubt, leave a device watched; excluding is one click later, on the Global Exclusions screen.

4. How do I set up email?

Add and configure Home Assistant's SMTP integration, then open the Notifications and Daily Brief screen and pick the new notify service under Send the Full Brief To. The full styled brief arrives in your inbox on its schedule.

5. What is still not built?

Two things. Signal problems are recorded and charted but do not yet alert, because the right data is still being collected; The Signal Dwell Chart explains what you get today. And the coordinator features, pairing windows, outage recognition, the bridge sensor, exist only for Zigbee2MQTT so far. Building them for ZHA and Z-Wave needs a volunteer reference system, and those pages say exactly how to help.

6. What is next?

A Device Sentinel dashboard. One ready-made screen that puts the whole integration in one place: the problem list to act on, the daily brief to read, the battery report and the signal dwell chart beside it, and the status of your bridge and broker at a glance. You will install it from HACS, point it at your system, done. It is not built yet, but it is where this project is heading.

How It Works

7. Why does it watch devices instead of entities?

Because hardware fails as a whole. If any entity on a device reports, the device is alive. Watching at the device level means one verdict per physical thing, not thirty per gadget.

8. What are gaps?

A gap is the quiet time between two reports from a device. Every device has a natural gap size: seconds for a motion sensor in a hallway, hours for a door that is rarely opened. Device Sentinel records each device's longest gap per day, and that history becomes the device's rhythm.

9. What is dwell?

Dwell is the percent of the day a device's signal spent at or below its danger line. 0 percent is a day the signal never touched the line; small numbers are healthy links brushing their line. The Signal Dwell Chart shows it for the whole fleet.

10. What is the difference between Battery: Low and Battery: Falling?

Low is about now: the level is at or below your threshold. Falling is about the future: the level is dropping fast enough to reach empty within your Days Till Empty setting, even if it reads high today. Falling exists because some cells hold near full charge for their whole life and then drop quickly at the end; The Battery Report tells that story.

11. Will it survive a restart or reboot?

Yes. Learned rhythms, device clocks, problem list state, and any freeze in progress all survive. A device that had been silent twenty hours before a reboot is still a twenty-hour silence after it.

12. Will this slow my system down or cause lag in my automations?

No. Device Sentinel only listens to events Home Assistant already produces: it polls nothing, sends nothing over your radio networks, and never sits between a device and your automations. Its bookkeeping happens in memory, and disk writes are batched on a timer you control. Built to Be Efficient has the numbers.

Understanding the Numbers

13. Why is Devices: Watched lower than my device count?

Because service entries, add-ons, cloud connections, and dashboard helpers have no hardware to watch. They are ignored, and the Service Devices Ignored count on the device page holds them.

14. Why is Devices: Learned zero, or low?

Learning takes seven days of history per device, so a fresh install climbs slowly. And devices with no natural heartbeat, buttons and remotes that only speak when pressed, never establish a rhythm at all.

15. Why does Status say Learning?

Because no device has finished learning its rhythm yet. It flips to Watching when the first device arms, and unavailable and unknown detection is live in the meantime.

16. Why is a healthy device showing a signal dwell number?

Because its danger line sits just above its worst normal, a healthy link brushes that line now and then. Small numbers are the design working, not a problem. A device to look at is one whose number is large or climbing day after day.

Troubleshooting

17. I excluded something by accident, will it have to be re-learned after I un-exclude it?

No. Exclusion stops the reporting, never the learning. The moment you un-exclude a device, its full history, which is retained, is there and judgment resumes instantly.

18. A device shows as "not reported". What does that mean?

Device Sentinel has never seen it say anything since it was discovered. Usually that is a device that is dead, unpowered, or was removed without being deleted from the registry. If the device is genuinely alive, pressing Enable Last Seen on the device page often gives it a voice.

19. A dead device is not showing in the Device: Frozen count.

Three usual reasons: the count sensor ships switched off, so enable it from the entity's settings; the device is still learning and can only be judged unavailable or unknown so far; or the device is a button-type with no heartbeat, which is not judged frozen by design.

20. A battery is one percent above my threshold and still flagged.

That is deliberate. A flagged battery stays flagged until it climbs a couple of points clear of the threshold, so a cell hovering exactly at the line does not flap in and out of your reports.

21. My Zigbee coordinator went down and the problem list filled with dozens of devices. Is that a malfunction?

No, it is the truth: those devices really were unreachable. The daily brief names the coordinator outage as the cause, and everything clears when the coordinator returns. One event, one explanation.

22. Every MQTT device went unavailable at once. What happened?

Your MQTT broker stopped. The Broker: MQTT sensor records the outage, the devices are cleared of blame, and the brief reports one broker event instead of dozens of mysteries. The Bridge and Broker Sensors explains it.

23. The log says a notification service was not found.

A notify service you picked was renamed or removed. Open the Notifications and Daily Brief screen and re-pick a valid service; until then the integration logs the warning and carries on.

24. The house lost power. What happens when it comes back?

The unclean shutdown is recognized on the next start and reported. At most, one write interval of routine clock progress is lost, and that repairs itself as each device reports again. Nothing learned is at risk.

25. How do I show the brief or the signal chart on a dashboard?

Add a Webpage card pointed at /local/device_sentinel/daily_brief.html, or signal_dwell.html, or battery_report.html. The addresses never change. For the problem list, use the standard to-do list card pointed at todo.device_sentinel_problem_list.

26. Something looks wrong. What do you need from me?

Two things: what you expected and what you saw, and the diagnostics download from Settings, Devices and Services, Device Sentinel, three-dot menu, Download diagnostics. Then open an issue and attach both.