Notifications and Daily Brief

This configuration screen determines how you want to be notified when Device Sentinel detects a problem. It is divided into three sections and built around a single principle: your phone should only interrupt you when something genuinely needs your attention.

This page explains how the different notification tiers work, how to set them up, and how to keep the integration quiet while you sleep.

1. Target Tiers (Who Gets What)

When selecting your notification services, you assign them to tiers. The difference between these tiers is not loudness, but whether live, immediate events reach that person at all.

• High-Priority Targets: Receive live, per-kind phone pushes the moment a problem settles, plus a message-sized version of the daily brief.
• Normal-Priority Targets: Receive only the message-sized daily brief. They are never bothered by live, individual device problems.

The "No High-Priority" Rule of Thumb

Do not set up High-Priority targets during your first two weeks.

Until you have eliminated the noise from your system by excluding and muting devices, you do not need to hear about every detail exactly when it happens. Even after your system is tuned, ask yourself if an alert is truly necessary. You probably do not want to know at 3:00 AM that your closet door sensor is frozen; that can easily wait until your morning brief.

Save high-priority alerts for mission-critical setups, like security sensors at a vacant property, or water leak sensors. For everyday monitoring, rely on the Daily Brief and the dashboard card.

2. Instant Notifications (Phone Pushes)

These are the live alerts sent to High-Priority targets. They follow strict rules to prevent notification fatigue.

• Grouped by Kind: To prevent spam, pushes are grouped by kind (one for device liveness, one for battery, one for signal). When an event occurs, the push tells you exactly what just happened and the current standing state of that kind, giving you the complete picture in one message.
• Faults Sound, Recoveries are Silent: New faults play your phone's normal notification sound. Recoveries arrive silently. A device coming back online is good news that updates your picture, but it should not interrupt your day.
• The Settle Period: A device must stay in a fault state for a settle period before any instant notification is triggered, so brief network hiccups do not reach your phone. This period scales to each device's natural rhythm: roughly a third of the gap that device normally reports in, so a chatty sensor waits a minute or two and a twice-a-day sensor waits longer.

When a Bridge or Broker Goes Down

Behind a stopped bridge or broker, every device goes quiet at once. A message per casualty would bury the one sentence worth reading.

While an upstream is down, its casualties are counted rather than named. You receive one message naming the upstream coordinator (the thing you can actually fix). Every later message about that upstream is silent and carries the current tally, so the number on your phone stays true without interrupting you again. The recovery is announced once and silently, carrying how many devices had gone quiet.

3. Quiet Hours

During your defined quiet hours, no phone pushes are sent.

If a device drops offline at 3:00 AM, the event is recorded, the dashboard card updates, and it is added to your daily brief, but your phone will not alert. If a problem opens and heals entirely while you are sleeping, it is noted in the daily brief, but it never triggers a delayed push once quiet hours end.

4. The Daily Brief

This section controls the scheduling and delivery of your daily summary report. The Daily Brief page describes what the report itself contains.

When to Send It

This single setting does two jobs: it sets the hour the brief is delivered, and it defines the 24-hour reporting window.

• Align with Quiet Hours: The most common setup is to align the brief with the end of your Quiet Hours. If your quiet hours end at 7:00 AM, set the brief for 7:00 AM.
• The Window: If you set the brief for 7:00 AM, the report covers 7:00 AM yesterday to 7:00 AM today. This keeps overnight network outages together in one logical report rather than splitting them across two days.
• Calendar Days: If you prefer strict calendar days, set this to Midnight.

(Note: Only the history is bounded by this window. The "Right Now" section of the brief is read at the exact moment the file is written, so a 7:00 AM brief tells you exactly what is broken at 7:00 AM.)

How Often

You have three delivery choices:

• Every day: Sends the brief regardless of your system's state. On perfectly clean days, this acts as a reassuring all-clear.
• Only when something needs attention: Stays completely silent on clean days.
• Never: No messages are sent anywhere. The file is still written to your disk and can be viewed manually.

Send the Full Brief To

This is a third target list specifically for services capable of carrying a full, formatted HTML document. High- and normal-priority targets only receive a condensed, message-sized summary; targets in this list receive the complete brief as a styled page, tables included.

To use email: Configure Home Assistant's SMTP integration once, and its notify service will appear in this dropdown.

Links in Reports

Device names in the battery report, the signal report and the daily brief can link to that device's page in Home Assistant. On a house where nine sensors are called "Temperature & Humidity", this is the difference between a puzzle and an answer.

Choose One:

• None: names print as plain text. This is the default.
• Internal URL: the address to access Home Assistant from your home WiFi.
• External URL: the address to access Home Assistant from outside your home.

Each choice shows the address it would use, and one Home Assistant does not hold is refused rather than saved. If Home Assistant later loses the address you chose, the daily brief's Recommendations section tells you.

Default is "None". A report is a file you might share or attach to an issue. Keep this in mind when setting this.

The area beside each device name is always shown and is not affected by this choice.

5. The Persistent Card

If enabled, this creates a single card for your Home Assistant notification panel that displays the current trouble state of your entire home. It is organized by kind (Device, Battery, Signal).

• Silent & Constant: Because it is silent by nature, it ignores quiet hours and continuously updates day and night.
• Always Accurate: It is rewritten every time something changes.
• All Clear: It reads "All devices reporting" when your system is perfectly clean.

You can turn this on or off using the Create a Persistent Notification toggle on this settings page.

Acknowledging Problems

If you acknowledge a device in the problem list (by checking its box), it silences all instant notifications about it across all channels: the card, the pushes, and the brief.

• If the acknowledged device worsens, nothing is sent, because your acknowledgment was a statement that you are already aware of the issue.
• If the device recovers on its own, the recovery is reported, because a recovery is news and the acknowledgment ends when the problem does.