Notifications and Daily Brief

Notifications and Daily Brief

One screen decides who hears about problems and when. It has three sections.

Instant notifications

These are the messages sent when a device develops a problem. They follow a small set of rules, all of them designed to keep your phone quiet unless something genuinely needs you.

High-priority targets receive a message when a device develops a problem, and the daily brief with its full history. Each troubled device holds exactly one notification, which is replaced as its situation changes and removed silently when the device recovers or you acknowledge it. The phone is a live status board, not a log: it shows what is wrong and unacknowledged right now, and nothing else. The history lives in the daily brief.

Normal-priority targets receive only the daily brief, and only its current state. They are never messaged about individual problems.

A problem must persist for a settle period before anything is sent, so a device that hiccups and recovers within moments never reaches your phone. The settle period scales with each device's own rhythm and can be adjusted on the Advanced screen.

Acknowledging a device in the problem list silences all instant notifications about it. If an acknowledged device recovers on its own, the daily brief mentions it; if it worsens, nothing is sent, because acknowledging a problem means you expect it to continue.

Create a persistent notification shows one card per troubled device on the Home Assistant dashboard, following the same rules as the phone: replaced as things change, cleared on recovery or acknowledgment.

Quiet hours

Nothing is sent during quiet hours. Not high priority, not anything. A problem that appears at 3 AM is recorded, appears in the daily brief, and if it is still standing when quiet hours end, your phone is brought up to date then: missing notifications are sent, stale ones are cleared. Events that opened and healed during the night are not pushed at all; the brief carries them.

Daily brief

The brief is a report file, daily_brief_YYYY-MM-DD.md, written every day beside the other reports and kept for fourteen days. It has two sections: what needs attention now, and what happened in the last 24 hours, in plain language. It is written whether or not anyone receives it.

When to send it does two jobs from one setting. It is the hour the brief is sent, and it is the boundary the window runs between: a brief set to 7 AM covers 7 AM to 7 AM, so an overnight problem appears in one report rather than being split across two. Set it to midnight if you would rather have calendar days.

Only the history is bounded that way. What needs attention now is read at the moment the file is written, so a 7 AM brief tells you where things stand at 7 AM whatever window it is reporting on. The file is named for the day its window opened, which means a 7 AM brief arrives on the following morning under yesterday's date; The Reports explains that in full.

How often has three choices. Every day sends the brief even when nothing needs attention, as an all-clear that also proves the system is alive. Only when something needs attention stays silent on clean days. Never sends nothing; the file is still written.

Send the full brief to takes email or other services that can carry the whole document. High- and normal-priority targets receive a message-sized version; these targets receive the file itself. If the list is empty, no document is sent anywhere. Email is delivered through Home Assistant's own notify services, most commonly the SMTP integration: configure SMTP once, and its notify service appears in this list.

Pressing the Regenerate Reports button rewrites today's brief mid-day, marked incomplete and stating its window, replacing itself until the scheduled brief closes the day.