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. What is wrong with your devices belongs on the list. What is wrong with Device Sentinel belongs in Repairs.

The Issues

Storage repaired. Device Sentinel checks its own stored data against the shape it expects, before it reads any of it and again every time it writes. 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 companion file holding each device's activity clocks.

Where something does not fit, it is repaired rather than left. A damaged field is reset to its default and the rest of that device's record is kept. A row that is not a row is dropped from its log. The card names exactly what was repaired, and the originals are copied aside first, into config/device_sentinel/trim_backups, before anything is written.

Nothing is asked of you. Press Submit to record that you have read it.

Storage restored. Device Sentinel keeps a copy of the last storage file that passed every check. Where the damage is worse than a field or a row, that copy replaces the live file and the load runs again on the copy.

The card says when the copy was taken and what falling back to it cost, which is the counters recorded since then. Daily statistics are usually untouched. As with a repair, the originals are copied aside first, and Submit clears the card.

While a fault stands, the good copy is left alone rather than refreshed over the top of it, so it stays the last file known to be sound.

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, rather than on every restart.

Only devices Device Sentinel watches are counted.

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.

Until you set one, the persistent card still appears in Home Assistant's own notification panel unless you turned it off, and 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. A problem still true when the startup window closes is raised then.

There is no continuous check. If you clear a card and the condition is still true, it comes back at the next of those two moments rather than immediately.

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. Each one is raised again on the next start if its condition still holds, so an issue never outlives the thing it describes.

Severity. Storage issues are errors and everything else is a warning. Nothing here is ever critical.

Every issue with a Fix button also offers Ignore inside the fix screen, so 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.