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The Device Page

TheThinkingHome edited this page Aug 8, 2026 · 26 revisions

The Device Page

This page describes what each entity on the integration's main page in Home Assistant does and what it is used for: Settings, Devices and Services, Device Sentinel.

The Device Sentinel device page in Home Assistant, showing its control buttons and diagnostic sensors

Controls

Problem List. State: the number of unacknowledged items in the list. Device Sentinel's todo list contains frozen and unavailable devices, devices with low or falling batteries, and signals stuck at a false value, one row per current finding. Checking a row acknowledges it and it will not show up in new reports; a finding that recovers is automatically removed.

Sensors

The finding counts here ship switched off; enable the ones you want from each entity's own settings.

Status. State: Watching, Learning, or Problem. Learning shows only until the first device establishes its rhythm; Watching shows from then on; Problem means Device Sentinel's own storage is unhealthy. The setup count and install date ride as attributes, and so do three counts, one per enable button: signal_awaiting_enable, last_seen_awaiting_enable, and battery_awaiting_enable. Each is how many entities that button can enable when pressed. After the initial press, a count that appears later indicates an integration update shipped new entities that were disabled. When a number surprises you, the answer is in the log: every press records exactly which entities it enabled.

Maintenance: Ends. State: how long until the open maintenance window ends, and unknown while no window is open. See Maintenance Mode.

Battery: Falling. State: how many cells are projected to reach empty inside your Days Till Empty setting (default 30 days). See The Battery Report.

Battery: Low. State: how many batteries are below the threshold (default 20%). The count is the state, and the attributes carry one row per device (name, entity, area, level, low-since, plus the thresholds in effect).

Device: Frozen. State: how many devices are either frozen, unavailable, or unknown. Its attributes contain the list of devices it has detected.

Signal: Rails. State: how many devices are reporting a false signal. These are signals stuck at a rail value of 255 LQI or -128 RSSI for three or more days.

Signal: Weak. State: how many devices are currently reporting low signal strength. This one is live: a device appears while it is struggling and drops off as soon as it recovers.

Bridge: Zigbee2MQTT. State: running, binding, down, or unknown. Running is the coordinator online with its pairing window closed. Binding means a pairing window is open, and a device that recovers during one is treated as your re-pair rather than learned as its own behavior. Down means the coordinator reported offline or its retained state went stale, and freeze verdicts pause for its devices because their silence is the bridge's fault, not theirs. Unknown means nothing has been heard from the bridge yet. One bridge sensor exists per detected coordinator stack, created switched on where one was found, and an availability_enabled attribute reads whether the stack's own availability feature is turned on. See The Bridge and Broker Sensors.

Broker: MQTT. State: running, down, or unknown. This is the MQTT broker every Zigbee2MQTT message rides through, and down is the loudest thing on this page: behind a stopped broker every MQTT device goes quiet at once, so Device Sentinel attributes the silence to the broker rather than opening a problem per device, and freeze judgment waits for it to return. It arrives switched on where a coordinator was found; without one it exists but stays off so it does not read unknown forever. See The Bridge and Broker Sensors.

Configuration

Enable Signals, Enable Last Seen, Enable Battery. Three buttons, one per diagnostic kind. Each scans your entity registry for entities of that kind that an integration shipped turned off, and turns them on so Device Sentinel can learn from them. They are split into three buttons so you can enable exactly what is needed:

  • Enable Last Seen: turns on last-contact entities. This is protocol truth and the most reliable clock a device can offer, strengthening freeze detection.
  • Enable Battery: turns on the battery-percentage sensors that the discharge history records.
  • Enable Signals: turns on the link-quality entities the signal floor learns from.

Maintenance Mode. Press this before you work on your hardware. For the next ten minutes, adjustable under Advanced, any device that recovers is treated as your fix rather than learned as its own behavior, so a battery swap or a re-pair never teaches Device Sentinel that a long silence is normal for that device. Press it again to end the window early. See Maintenance Mode.

Regenerate Reports. Regenerates all reports: the three Markdown files under config/device_sentinel (the telemetry, the classification and the silence episodes), and the three HTML pages under www/device_sentinel (The Daily Brief, The Battery Report, and The Signal Dwell Chart).

Diagnostic

Battery: Tracked. How many devices have an elected battery entity, minus the battery-excluded devices.

Devices: Learned. How many devices have an established rhythm, meaning enough learned days to be judged for a freeze. This count is not expected to reach Devices: Watched, because devices with no natural heartbeat, like buttons and remotes, never establish a rhythm and are never judged frozen, by design.

Device: Tracked. How many devices have a learned rhythm and are eligible for freeze detection, minus the global device excludes.

Devices: Watched. How many devices are being observed and learned. The split behind this number (total, set aside, deviceless entities) rides as attributes.

Signal: Tracked. How many devices have a learned signal floor and therefore a live danger line, minus the signal-excluded devices. The scale split (LQI and RSSI) and the still-learning count ride as attributes.

Service Devices Ignored. Devices with no hardware to watch, such as service entries, cloud connections, and integration containers. Device Sentinel classifies these out automatically. This is not the exclude list; you did not choose these and they need no action from you. Like the tracked counts, this one is switched off when you install, because it answers a question most people ask once if ever. Turn it on from the entity's own settings if you want it.

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