The Watchman

The world around us is constantly changing and so is Home Assistant. How often have you found yourself in a situation when your automations had stopped working because some entities become permanently unavailable or services changed their names? For example, Home Assistant companion app can easily change the name of its services and sensors it exposes to Home Assistant if you changed the device name in the app configuration. The watchman is an attempt to control such unwelcome changes and make you able to react proactively, before some critical automation gets broken.

Discussion on Home Assistant Community Forum

Quick start

1. Go to the "Integrations" section on HACS, click "Explore and download repositories" and search for "watchman", then click "Download this repository with HACS".
2. Restart Home Assistant, go to Settings->Devices and Services->Add Integration and select Watchman integration. If integration not found, try to empty your browser cache and reload page.
3. Go to Developer Tools -> Services, type watchman and select Watchman: report service then press "Call Service" button. Check watchman_report.txt file in your configuration directory.

Refer to the Configuration section for further fine-tuning.

What does it do

The watchman is a custom integration for Home Assistant, which collects all the Home Assistant entities (sensors, timers, input_selects, etc.) mentioned in your yaml configuration files as well as all the services. Having a list of all entities, the integration checks their actual state one by one and reports those are not available or missing. For services it checks whether service is available in the HA service registry. The report can be stored as a nice-looking text table or it can be sent via notification service of choice (unless it is missing too :). The example of a report is given below.

The integration has very simple internals, it knows nothing about complex relationships and dependencies among yaml configuration files as well as nothing about the semantics of entities and automations. It parses yaml files line by line and tries to guess references either to an entity or to a service, based on the regular expression heuristics. The above means the integration can give both false positives (something which looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but is not) and false negatives (when some entity in a configuration file was not detected by the integration). To ignore false positives Ignored entities and services parameter can be used (see Configuration section below), improvements for false negatives are a goal for future releases.

Configuration

Integration settings are available in Settings->Devices & Services->Watchman->Configure.

Option	Description	Default
Notification service	Home assistant notification service to send report via, e.g. notify.telegram.	None
Notification service data	A json object with additional notification service parameters. See example below.	None
Included folders	Comma-separated list of folders to scan for entities and services recursively.	/config
Custom header for the report	Custom header for watchman report.	"-== Watchman Report ==-"
Report location	Report location and filename.	"/config/watchman_report.txt"
Ignored entities and services	Comma-separated list of items to ignore. The entity/service will be excluded from the report if their name matches a rule from the ignore list. Wildcards are supported, see example below.	None
Ignored entity states	Comma-separated list of entity states which should be excluded from the report. Possible values are: missing, unavailable, unknown.	None
Message chunk size	Maximum message size in bytes. Some notification services, e.g., Telegram, refuse to deliver a message if its size is greater than some internal limit. If report text size exceeds chunk_size, the report will be sent in several subsequent notifications. 0 value will disable chunking.	3500
Ignored files	Comma-separated list of files and folders to ignore. Wildcards are supported, see example below. Takes precedence over Included folders option.	None
Report's column width	Report's columns width. The list of column widths for the table version of the report.	30, 7, 60
Startup delay	By default, watchman's sensors are updated by homeassistant_started event. Some integrations may require extra time for intiialization so that their entities/services may not yet be ready during watchman check. This is especially true for single-board computers like Raspberry PI. This option allows to postpone startup sensors update for certain amount of seconds.	0
Add friendly names	Add friendly name of the entity to the report whenever possible.	False
Parse dashboards UI	Parse Dashboards UI (ex-Lovelace) configuration data stored in .storage folder besides of yaml configuration.	False

Ignored files option example

• Ignore a file: */automations.yaml
• Ignore all files in the folder: /config/esphome/*
• Ignore several folders: /config/custom_components/*, /config/appdaemon/*, /config/www/*

Ignored entities and services option example

• Ignore an entity: person.dummylabs
• Ignore everything in sensor domain: sensor.*
• Ignore any entity/service which name ends with "_ble": *.*_ble

Send report via telegram bot

• Notification service: telegram_bot.send_message
• Notification service data: {"parse_mode":"html"}

Watchman.report service

The text version of the report can be generated using watchman.report service from Developer Tools UI, an automation or a script. Default location is /config/thewatchman_report.txt, which can be altered by report_path configuration option. A long report will be split into several messages (chunks) due to limitations imposed by some notification services (e.g., telegram). Service behaviour can be altered with additional optional parameters:

• create_file create text version of the report (optional, default=true)
• send_notification send report via notification service (optional, default=false)
• service notification service name (optional, overrides eponymous parameter from integration settings)
• data notification service data (optional, overrides eponymous parameter from integration settings)
• parse_config see below (optional, default=false)
• chunk_size (optional, default is 3500 or whatever specified in integration settings)

The parameter service allows sending report text via notification service of choice. Along with data and chunk_size it overrides integration settings.

parse_config forces watchman to parse Home Assistant configuration files and rebuild entity and services list. Usually this is not required as watchman will automatically parse files once Home Assistant restarts or tries to reload its configuration. Also see Advanced usage examples section at the bottom of this document.

Call service from Home Assistant UI

Extra notification service parameters example

service: watchman.report
create_file: false
data:
  service: telegram_bot.send_message
  data: # additional parameters for your notification service
    parse_mode: html
    target: 111111111 # can be omitted, see telegram_bot documentation

Sensors

Besides of the report, a few sensors will be added to Home Assistant:

• sensor.watchman_missing_entities
• sensor.watchman_missing_services
• sensor.watchman_last_updated

Example of a watchman report

Please note that the ASCII table format is only used when report is saved to a file. For notification services watchman uses plain text list due to presentation limitations.

-== WATCHMAN REPORT ==-

-== Missing 1 service(s) from 38 found in your config:
+--------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------+
| Service                        | State   | Location                                 |
+--------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------+
| xiaomi_miio.vacuum_goto        | missing | automations.yaml:599,605                 |
+--------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------+

-== Missing 3 entity(ies) from 216 found in your config:
+--------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------+
| Entity                         | State   | Location                                 |
+--------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------+
| sensor.stats_pm25_10_median    | unavail | customize.yaml:14                        |
| sensor.xiaomi_miio_sensor      | unavail | automations.yaml:231,1348                |
| vacuum.roborock_s5max          | unavail | automations.yaml:589,603,610,1569        |
+--------------------------------+---------+------------------------------------------+

-== Report created on 03 Feb 2022 17:18:55
-== Parsed 200 files in 0.96s., ignored 66 files
-== Generated in: 0.01s. Validated in: 0.00s.

The legend at the bottom of the report shows time consumed by 3 coherent stages: parse configuration files, validate each entity/service state and generate text version of the report.

Markdown card example

Watchman sensors sensor.watchman_missing_entities and sensor.watchman_missing_services have additional set of attributes which makes it possible to create your own report using a lovelace card. Below is an example of missing entities report for the Lovelace markdown card:

type: markdown
content: >-
  <h2> <ha-icon icon='mdi:shield-half-full'></ha-icon> Watchman report</h2>
  <h3>Missing Entities: {{ states.sensor.watchman_missing_entities.state }} </h3>
  {%- for item in state_attr("sensor.watchman_missing_entities", "entities") %}
  <hr> <table><tr> <td>
  <ha-icon icon='mdi:
  {%- if item.state=="missing"-%}cloud-alert'
  {%- elif item.state=="unavail" -%}cloud-off-outline' {%- else-%}cloud-question'
  {%- endif -%} ></ha-icon>
  {{ item.id }} [{{item.state}}] <a title="{{item.occurrences}}">
  {{item.occurrences.split('/')[-1].split(':')[0]}}</a>
  </td></tr></table>
  {%- endfor %}
card_mod:
  style:
    ha-markdown:
      $: |
        ha-markdown-element:first-of-type hr{
          border-color: #303030;
        }

Important considerations:

1. Make sure you are in code editor mode before pasting this code into the markdown card
2. card_mod section is optional and requires a custom lovelace card to be installed for extra styling
3. Put mouse pointer over a file name to see full path to a file and line numbers
4. To display line numbers in the report just remove .split(':')[0] from the card template

The code for the services report looks very similar:

type: markdown
content: >-
  <h2 class="some"> <ha-icon icon='mdi:shield-half-full'></ha-icon> Watchman report</h2>
  <h3> Missing Services: {{ states.sensor.watchman_missing_services.state }} </h3>
  {%- for item in state_attr("sensor.watchman_missing_services", "entities") %}
  <hr><table><tr> <td>  <ha-icon icon='mdi:cloud-alert'></ha-icon> {{ item.id }}
  <a title="{{item.occurrences}}">{{item.occurrences.split('/')[-1].split(':')[0]}}</a>
  </td></tr></table>
  {%- endfor %}
card_mod:
  style:
    ha-markdown:
      $: |
        ha-markdown-element:first-of-type hr{
          border-color: #303030;
        }

Exclude Watchman from the recorder

If you encounter a warning from the Recorder component "State attributes for sensor.watchman_missing_entities exceed maximum size of 16384 bytes" you can exclude these using following configuration:

# Don't include watchman results in recorder as they're too big!
recorder:
  exclude:
    entities:
      - sensor.watchman_missing_entities
      - sensor.watchman_missing_services

There is the ticket #87 addressing this issue.

Advanced usage examples

Additional notification service parameters

Notification service name can be specified in integration options along with additional service parameters.

UI settings example

Additional notification service parameters in Watchman:report service

You can use an arbitrary notification service with watchman.report service. Service paramaters takes precedence over eponymous UI settings.

service: watchman.report
data:
  service: telegram_bot.send_message
  data:
    title: Hello
    parse_mode: html

Send report as a text file via telegram bot

You should add report folder to the Home Assistant whitelist, otherwise telegram_bot will be unable to pick files from the folder (see example configuration below).

service: watchman.report
data:
  service: telegram_bot.send_document
  data:
    file: '/config/thewatchman_report.txt'

⚠️ Whitelisting the configuration folder can be unsafe, use it at your own risk or put report file in a separate folder.

homeassistant:
  allowlist_external_dirs:
    - /config/