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 the moment a device develops a problem. They follow a small set of rules, all of them meant to keep your phone quiet unless something genuinely needs you.

There are three surfaces, and each one replaces its own last message rather than stacking, so you are never left scrolling a pile of stale alerts.

The persistent card is one card on the Home Assistant dashboard, always showing the current trouble state of the whole home. It is grouped by kind: a Device line for anything frozen, unavailable, unknown, or never reported, a Battery line for low cells, a Signal line for railed links. It is rewritten every time something changes and reads "All devices reporting" when nothing is wrong. It is silent by nature, so it is never held back by quiet hours. The Create a persistent notification toggle turns it on or off.

Phone pushes go to high-priority targets only, one per kind. A battery problem, a signal problem, and a device-liveness problem each send their own push, carrying the event that just happened and then the current state of that kind, so one push tells you both what changed and what is standing now. A new fault plays your phone's normal notification sound; a recovery arrives silently, because a device coming back is good news that should update the picture without interrupting anyone.

High-priority targets receive the phone pushes above and the daily brief. Normal-priority targets receive only the daily brief, and only its current state. They are never messaged about individual problems. The difference between the tiers is not loudness; it is whether the live events reach you at all.

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 every instant notification about it, on the card and on the phone alike. If an acknowledged device recovers on its own, its recovery still comes through, because a recovery is news; if it worsens while acknowledged, nothing is sent, because acknowledging a problem is the statement that you already know.

Quiet Hours

Nothing is pushed to a phone during quiet hours. A problem that appears at 3 AM is recorded, shows on the persistent card, and is carried into the daily brief, but no phone push is sent for it. Events that open and heal during the night are not pushed either; the brief carries them. The card, being silent, keeps updating through the night for anyone who looks, so the current state is never hidden, it just does not ring.

Daily Brief

This section decides when the brief is sent and to whom. What the brief actually says, and how to read it, is on its own page: The Daily Brief.

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.