Repairs

Repairs

Problems with Device Sentinel itself, or with the plumbing beneath it, appear in Home Assistant's Repairs panel under Settings, with a Fix button where a fix exists.

Your devices never appear there. A frozen motion sensor, a low battery, a weak radio link: all of that belongs on the problem list, and none of it is a Repair. Every open issue lights the Settings badge for as long as it exists, so a device fault there would turn Repairs into a second and noisier copy of the problem list and teach you to ignore the gear. What is wrong with your devices belongs on the list. What is wrong with Device Sentinel belongs in Repairs.

The Four Issues

Storage shape. Device Sentinel checks its own stored data against the shape it expects, when it starts and again after the nightly rollover. Everything it holds is checked: the record it keeps for each device, the logs of incidents and system events, the problem list, the silence episodes, and the small companion file that holds each device's activity clocks. This issue appears when something does not fit.

Nothing is changed and nothing is lost. The check reports and touches nothing. Device Sentinel also keeps a copy of the last storage file that passed every check, and while a fault stands that copy is left alone rather than refreshed over the top of it.

This issue has no Fix button, and says so on the card rather than offering one that does nothing. It clears itself the next time the check finds nothing.

Disabled entities. Battery, signal, or last-seen entities that Device Sentinel would read are turned off in Home Assistant. Many integrations ship them that way.

While they are off, those devices are watched with less to go on. A battery that cannot be read is not tracked. A signal that cannot be read has no floor to fall from.

Checked after the nightly rollover, and on the first start after Device Sentinel updates. Not on every restart: an integration update is when diagnostics arrive switched off, and nothing about this changes in between, so meeting the same badge after every restart would be noise.

Only devices Device Sentinel watches are counted. A device that is set aside is not, because a reading on it cannot usefully be switched on.

Fixable. Fix opens a choice of two.

Enable does the same thing as the three enable buttons on the Device Page, all at once. It names how many entities it will turn on before you press it, and it reaches only devices that are enabled in their own integrations and not excluded in Device Sentinel. Nothing else about those devices changes, and you can turn any of them off again afterwards. If you want one kind rather than all three, the three buttons on the device page do exactly that.

Ignore hides the card and changes nothing. It stays hidden until you choose to show ignored issues again in the Repairs panel. This is the right choice when your entities are switched off deliberately: Device Sentinel keeps watching and learning those devices either way, and what it loses without a reading is that one kind of judgment.

Missing notification target. A target in your settings points at a notify service Home Assistant no longer has. This usually means a companion app was removed, or a phone was renamed.

It matters more than it looks. Every message sent to a target that does not exist fails and goes to the log, so Device Sentinel goes on watching your house and telling nobody, which is the failure it exists to catch happening to itself.

Fixable. Fix opens a choice of two.

Remove Them takes the dead targets out of Device Sentinel's settings and leaves your working ones alone. If that leaves you with none, set a new one under Notifications and Daily Brief.

Ignore hides the card and changes nothing, until you choose to show ignored issues again.

Nothing configured. After seven days with no target set for alerts and none for the daily brief, Device Sentinel says so once.

Seven days rather than straight away, because a new install is something you are still setting up, and a badge on your first evening telling you that you have not finished is not help. By the seventh day it is a settled state rather than one you are passing through.

The persistent card is still on unless you turned it off, so problems do appear in Home Assistant's notification panel. Nothing reaches a phone or an inbox. Not fixable, because where a notification should go is your decision: set a target under Settings, Devices and Services, Device Sentinel, Configure, Notifications and Daily Brief.

When They Are Checked

Two moments: when the startup grace closes, and after the nightly rollover.

Nothing is raised while Home Assistant is starting. Everything in the house reports at once on a restart and none of it is news, which is the same reason Device Sentinel does not judge a device inside that window. A problem still true when the grace ends is raised then.

There is no continuous check, on purpose. None of these four changes minute to minute, and an issue that reappeared while you were still reading it would be worse than one raised a few hours later.

What Else to Know

An issue is deleted the moment its cause clears. Nothing lingers. An issue still lit with nothing behind it hides the next real one inside itself.

One issue per problem, however many times it happens. A recurrence updates the issue you already have rather than stacking a second one beside it.

Issues do not survive a restart, and do not need to. Each one is re-raised on the next start if its condition still holds, which makes the condition the only thing that decides whether you see it. An issue can never outlive the thing it describes.

Severity. Storage issues are errors, everything else is a warning, and nothing here is ever critical. Critical is Home Assistant's word for a house you cannot use, and a monitoring integration is never that.

Every issue with a Fix button also offers Ignore. Home Assistant provides its own Ignore on an issue that has no fix, and takes it away as soon as one exists, so Device Sentinel offers it inside the fix screen instead. You are never left with a card you can only clear by accepting a change you did not want.

Events Are a Separate Thing

Repairs is about Device Sentinel. Automation Events is about your devices: Device Sentinel fires an event on the Home Assistant bus when a device lands on the problem list, when its worst problem clears, and when you acknowledge it, so an automation can react without polling anything.