What Is Recorded About Your House

What Is Recorded About Your House

Most pages on this wiki describe what Device Sentinel knows about the devices inside the home. This page covers what it knows about the house itself: the layers underneath each device, which fail in ways no individual device can explain.

On the reference system, sixteen minutes with the MQTT broker stopped took 75 devices offline and swelled the problem list from three items to 75 and back. Without house-level recording, the daily brief looked like a disaster with more than half of the home's devices failing at the same time without reporting why. By monitoring system level events, the report carries the cause of the event so that the fix becomes obvious.

The Four Layers

Each layer is recorded as an event that appears in the daily brief.

Home Assistant itself: Restarts and reboots are reported because the integration is offline and not listening. Unclean shutdowns are reported because the system stopped unexpectedly and system down-time is important. Both are detected and reported so that gaps are not lost and any that complete during the event are ignored as an intervention.

The MQTT broker: The integration reports when the broker is alive and when it is silent beyond what it expects. Home Assistant exposes no broker entity, so a broker outage is usually invisible. The broker is the system that listens to the coordinator and relays the coordinator's messages to Home Assistant.

The coordinator: Bridge outages and pairing windows, for Zigbee2MQTT. Covered fully on The Bridge and Broker Sensors.

Any integration: When every device from one integration reports at once, that burst is recorded as a reload.