I was wondering what you are doing to notify of fault | error | warning states from devices…
I have a section on my QH1 sitemap, and it has to be there (visibility, colour, etc) which shows on the home screen, if, e.g. a device fails to send a heart beat… like “Door Bell is broken” in red.
E.g.:
I concluded in order to see these system-wide messages, I would have to include this very same section (100 lines long, visibility in case of fault only) in each room screen.
Are there better ways of doing this?
I just had an idea to update a single topic and show it on all relevant pages; but this would require rules.
The way I deal with that on mine is a grouping (I call it infrastructure) in my advanced area where I list every item that can be pinged, with its status (as a switch). I’ve also got a rule which loops through them and optionally emails me and/or sends me a pushover message. That’s just based on ping through, not system errors logged
This is areally good question. I tried different approaches and none of the ist relly satifying.
1.) Give items a color if there is an error. But it is sometimes hard to define an error.
2.) Create a special alarm or waring or info panel. This is only shown if there is an error condition. Typically is ure if for empty batteries or unreachable items. Problem: The new basic UI does not support hiding frames
I use a Group to summarize all the status items (Group:Switch:OR(OFF,ON) gStatus) and put this on my sitemap. If the group switches to OFF I know to go to the one status section page of my sitemap to see what is offline.
Furthermore, in my Rules I check whether a device is offline and generate an alert when I attempt to send a command to a device that is offline.
I also generate alerts when the devices go down in the first place.
These alerts take various forms based on a lot of factors (whether someone is home, whether it is an alert my wife cares about, time of day, etc) and can include one or more of an audio announcement, email, myopenhab broadcast, and NotofyMyDroid.
So I get whether or not everything is online on my sitemap everywhere with one line of code but will have to navigate to a special area, or depend on alerts, to know which device is offline.
Ultimately, my plan is to move this job to a separate server that is built for this sort of thing, something like Nagios. And for the most part, I find that the alerts, particularly those that occur when I try to make an action and the device is offline, are more than sufficient to keep me up to date on what is online and offline. I almost never use the admin part of my sitemap.
As you may know, I have settled for MQTT whenever possible… as such, all my devices send heart beat messages between 10 seconds and 10 minutes. If the heart beat is not received, the expire binding will take care of sending a command which will make an item visible on the sitemap top level.
I was thinking of a similar approach to have a proxy item which gets updated, you are using a group – which I like… I will play with this idea. Yes, I am happy to move to the specific page to find the the item in question…
I am glad I had time trying different solutions, and building prototypes before I have to implement a solution my new house… it has been a bit more than a year since I started with OH…
