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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.
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.
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.
Enable Signals, Enable Last Seen, Enable Battery. Three buttons, one per diagnostic kind. Each scans your entity registry for disabled entities of that kind 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.
Most of what a press finds is what an integration shipped turned off, but the sweep does not stop there. An entity you disabled yourself is turned back on as well, and so are entities on devices that are currently set aside, because a disabled entity is the state these buttons exist to fix. If there is an entity you want left off, do not press that button; excluding the device does not protect it, because an excluded device is still watched and still learns. Every press writes to the log how many entities it enabled, how many of those you had disabled by hand, and the entity id of each one.
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).
Battery: Tracked. How many devices have an elected battery entity, minus the battery-excluded devices.
Data: Freeze, Data: Battery, Data: Signal. How much complete history stands behind each area of judgment, so you can see what a verdict is resting on without reading a diagnostics file. For each device the count is the length of the shortest series that area records, and the area itself reads the deepest of those across your fleet, so a set that gained a new series yesterday reads one day however deep its older members run. The state counts while the area fills and becomes a word when it is full: freeze and signal pass through a seven-day arming and then say Armed while they fill their judgment window (fourteen days of rhythm, thirty of signal floor) before reading Learned; battery has one seven-day milestone and reads Tracking after it. The count changes when a day folds at local midnight, alongside everything it describes. The series name, the target, the retention setting and the fleet's total device-days ride as attributes. These three arrive switched on.
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. How many devices are set aside, for any of the three reasons: nothing to watch (service entries, cloud connections, integration containers), disabled in Home Assistant by you or by their integration, or no entities registered at all. Device Sentinel classifies these out automatically, and the classification report names which reason caught each one. This is not the exclude list; you did not choose the first and third, and a device you disabled yourself returns to being watched the moment you enable it again. 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.
Device Sentinel is brought to you by James Lander at The Thinking Home. Read the story behind it: Reliable Home Assistant Dead Sensor Detection.
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Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later. Copyright © 2026 James Lander.
Start Here
Configuration
- The Device Page
- Notifications and Daily Brief
- Exclusions and Muting
- Low Battery
- Signal Strength
- Freeze Detection
- Advanced
The Reports
Automations
Understanding
- How Device Sentinel Learns
- Maintenance Mode
- The Bridge and Broker Sensors
- What Is Recorded About Your House
- Built to Be Efficient
Coordinator Stacks
Help
