The Problem List

The Problem List

The problem list is where Device Sentinel's detections become something you act on. It is a standard Home Assistant to-do entity, todo.device_sentinel_problem_list, visible in the sidebar's To-do panel, in the companion app, and on any dashboard through the ordinary to-do list card. It holds every problem the integration currently sees, and nothing else.

What fills it

The list is maintained by the detections alone, live. The moment a device is judged frozen, unavailable, unknown, or never reported, the moment a battery crosses the low threshold, or the moment a signal problem is confirmed, an item appears. The moment the last of a device's problems clears, its item is deleted. You never add to this list, and there is no add box; the one thing on it that is yours is the checkbox.

One line per device

A device appears once, however many problems it carries. The line leads with the device's name and then lists its problems in a fixed order: the freeze verdict first, because it says whether the device is alive at all, then the battery with its percentage, then signal. A frozen device whose battery then dies does not become a second entry; its one line grows a second problem. Tap the item open and the description gives each problem its readable start time. The item's due date is when the earliest problem began, so the list shows age at a glance.

The checkbox is the acknowledgment

Checking an item means one thing: you have seen this problem and decided it can wait, or that you will live with it. The item stays on the list, marked done, and it goes quiet. An acknowledged device leaves the daily brief entirely, including the brief that is emailed, and it will be silent in the per-problem messages too once those begin sending, because acknowledging a problem is the statement that you know about it and do not want reminding. It is still recorded in full in the other reports and in the diagnostics, where an audit belongs. The worked example is a vibration sensor in a vehicle that is away at the shop: unchecked, every daily brief would mention it; checked once, it stays silent for as long as it stays gone, and its line keeps itself current in the background. Acknowledgment ends when the problem does, so if the device recovers on its own the brief says so, and any later fault on it is a fresh one that speaks up normally.

Checking never means recovered. Recovery is detected, not declared: when the device comes back, its item is removed whether it was checked or not. That removal is also the automatic re-arm. If the same device fails again next month, that is a new incident, a fresh unchecked item, and a new notification.

Unchecking an item simply returns it to the open block. Deleting an item by hand while its device is still down is the hard un-acknowledge: the next sync re-adds it as a new incident and it will announce itself again.

The order

Open items sort alphabetically by device name, so the list reads like a roster rather than a timeline. Acknowledged items follow in the order you checked them, oldest first, so the checked section is a stable history that does not reshuffle as problems come and go around it. The integration owns this order; dragging items does not stick.

Restarts

A reboot changes nothing here. Problems and acknowledgments both live in the integration's storage, and detections are re-derived from stored clocks at startup, so a device twenty hours into a freeze is still listed twenty hours frozen after a restart, and the box you checked last week is still checked.

Excluding instead of acknowledging

An acknowledgment silences a current incident; an exclusion is the standing statement that a device should never be judged for that problem at all. If you find yourself re-acknowledging the same device every time it fails, the exclusion pages are the better tool: the device drops off the list at once and stays off.

On a dashboard

The standard to-do list card pointed at todo.device_sentinel_problem_list gives you the live report and the acknowledgment checkbox in one place. Two settings worth knowing: the card's completed section is where your acknowledged items live, so leave it visible, and avoid the card's "Remove completed items" menu action, which hand-deletes your acknowledgments and lets anything still down re-add and re-announce itself.