To get best out of your Home Assistant - it needs to run well and needs regular lubrication and service! Today we will look at some of the maintenance tasks you should do every now and then to keep your system running as smooth as it can without issues.
00:00 - Intro
00:27 - Maintain backups
03:52 - Improve Home Assistant logging
07:33 - Errors and Warnings in log files
11:27 - Database maintenance
13:33 - Missing entities and services
17:07 - Update and repairs
18:22 - Fix your database!
19:47 - How do you do it??
Don't forget to give this video thumb up if you liked it, subscribe if you still haven't and I'll see you next time!
Have fun!
Bearded Tinker
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#homeassistant #smarthome #management
Like the log automation and the Watchman HACS addon. Oddly enough, the timing of this video synced well with my current HA project. In the process of moving node-red to another server, restoring the flow made a mess of things, ended up rebuilding node-red from zero and during the process, discovered lots of duplicate entities and devices in HA, either renamed or reinstalled under a different name. Watchman is going to help sort things out. Never would have known about Watchman without your efforts on YT. Thanks you. 👍
Much needed PSA for us to act on these while things are still in working order. The full storage issue happened on my end 2 times and I had to monitor it since, to avoid it happening again. Thank you.
Storage can easily be overlooked - shame there is not an automatic warning out of box when it's for example 90% full. To pop-up like a repair.
Thank you. It was very helpful!
Glad it was helpful!
Great tips - always enjoy your videos
Thank you very much!!!!
Great video, we needed it.🎉
Glad you enjoyed it! Thank you !!!!
Wonderful topic, and yes I automate everything in my HA except this. :)
We need to do some tasks by hand ;)
Thanks BT!
Thank you!!!
that was actually useful. i learned something new today
Glad I could help - thanks for the comment!!
Very useful, thanks
Glad to hear that! Thanks for watching and comment!
BT! How did I not know about that logger service call? Holy…. Also why is that not a prebuilt setting in the settings…
It really should be out of box available somewhere in setting. Such an easy thing to add.
I use the Google drive backup add on, it automatically runs the backups, copies them to Google drive, has great version control (month/day/week fopies to keep), etc. Created a dedicated google account for the HA backups & get 15Gb for free
That's great - Samba Share is a bit simpler, but still works great. And since I have enough NAS storage, keeping copies locally. (actually, they are also duplicated on another site, but that's just NAS replication).
Hi BT. I found this video super useful thanks. Have you done a video on the other cards on your System Statistics view? I found the HA Statistics video you did, but I'd also like to implement the HA Config Cl card, the update card and the fix or ignore errors card. Thanks
Thank you very much! I'll have to do videos on that. I have video in travis for CI, but not using that anymore since they've switched licensing model. Since I moved fully to GitHub, nope, didn't do video on it. But I would also love to overhaul that part in my setup, as I have some empty notifications and it can be improved.
Follow very much the strategy. I would like to know how I can automate a frigate - image folder on a week bases. Still don't have automated way to do that.
Been using both Samba and Google backup, and Watchman for quite some time. Generally try to do extensive maintenance ever three months. Next vacation I might also install and try Spook, many seem to like it. I really like your logger automation, will add this to my setup shortly! 😀👏🏻 What Mosquito repellents are you using? [EDIT] Never mind, found your video about the Xiaomi Mija Mosquito Repellent. How well does it work after all this time since purchase?
Spook is great, really powerful swiss army knife for HA, but PLEASE read the docs. If you overdo - you can ruin your system.
I'd love to have some component/automatization which would automatically update HACS components if there is no Major change which would require config adjustments, etc. I have ton of them and each week I see at least 5-7 updates which have to be done manually. It's kind of painful process hah
That really would be nice to have. But also opens a potential can of worms. Some have restrictions and also breaking changes, so it's still good idea to check release notes before updating.
@@BeardedTinker I fully understand that. That's why the documentation could say something like `Breaking change` which would show it to you before updating. That way you'd read it but also update everything
My smart home is working it's best when I don't have to think about it. So hopefully I have to maintain it as little as possible. Probably an attitude I got coming from Hubitat, where everything is a black box you can't do anything about anyway. Still, it's good info to have. Does the database really not delete old log info and occasionally repack? That's surprising and honestly kind of worrying.
It deletes records after predefined period,But some people like to change that. Also there is long term database and standard database. Repack is not performed automatically - unless there was DB rebuild or upgrade.
I had trouble remembering to check hacs for updates so added a card on my home page based on the sensor.hacs value - this sensor shows how many hacs updates are pending - the card is hidden in the count is 0 ... please with this I used a blueprint to create a group based on the "update" domain and a small automation to refresh the group at start up so I now also have a sensor showing when, and how many, system and integration updates are pending
I'm using that sensor in my "bug" page with other similar stuff (OS, Supervisor, HA versions, last push to GitHub, stats about system etc.)
Hello friends!! Thanks again for your videos!! I have an issue! My TrueNAS integration does not allow me to change the sensor names. When I change it, simply do not changes. What Can I do? any idea? Thank you!
You are using HACS integration for TrueNAS integration? Probably best way is to ask here in issues, on GItHub. I don't use TrueNAS.
Actually, if you have too many backup files Home Assistant will time out instead of giving you a list of the files. Only solution is to delete old backup files. Reason it takes so much time is that HA opens each backup file to read the details. If it takes >30 seconds you are screwed. There is an open Github issue for this problem, but nobody seems to be working on it.
Noticed that when I have 20+ backups. It looks like it hanged. Will check GItHub!!! Thanks Jonny
I have Watchman & Spook.
Spook - one of those things I'm postponing to do video for so so so long. Really powerful tool, but people don't read the docs, and it can also ruin your system, if you don't know what you're doing.
How do I automate these tasks? 😜
Not easily😉. You can automate backup, database purge and creating report on missing services and entities, but other tasks...
Spook is much better, Watchman was last updated 1+ years ago.
It is - I remember before Frenck released it publicly we were joking about on how many people will ruin their HA with it.
Watchman is better for lovelace maintenance. It gives you quite clear information so you can clean it up at once. Spook Has more features and is maintained for the time being so there can be no argue which of them is better. Both just have different use cases
On the other hand, I can’t help thinking that it’s kinda odd that the Spook homepage itself says “If you would ever ask me, if you should use Spook? I would say: No.” Like, what? That’s not unlike if a girl or guy were to say, “If you would ever ask me, should you go on a date with me? I would say: No.”
I use both and Watchman is great to make own dahboards. I have a system dashboard with all datas of my HA, and thnaks to Watchman I added alert cards with number of entities and services missing and the ability to have a filtered list by clicking the card. It seems that is not possible with Spook.
@@handcoding that's also one of the reasons I've never made video on it. It's very powerful tool, but can also break things if not properly used. Most of the standard things are really safe, but some service calls can permanently delete things.
Great! Thank you. Since I started with HA some years ago and you where my guide in this starting in Syno/Docker I have all the by you mentioned things in the video already running and configured. Still, It's nice to see that I am doing it oke. Maybe you know the following. For Watchman is a card available. So, you can see on your dashboard which entities and services are missing and a button to make the report and send it to a notifier. And in my logger I am using filters, like this: # Example configuration.yaml entry logger: default: error logs: # log level for HA recorder # Log level to check what the purge and repack DB does. homeassistant.components.recorder: error # Log level for Pyscript since 08-06-2023 custom_components.pyscript: info # log level for HA notify homeassistant.components.notify: fatal filters: aioesphomeapi.reconnect_logic: - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for bluetooth-zolder" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for led-test" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for tempsensor" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for bluetooth-1st-floor" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for Zehnder-rf" The filter way is a fine solution f you want to get messages from device in esphome but not all of them. Maybe somebody can use it 🙂
Thank you!!! Nice one, will definitely steal the filer part and put it in my setup. Most of the ESPHome devices I have are battery based, so a LOT of errors from that. I also have few Z2M MQTT errors that I've been trying to fix for 2 years now and no matter what I do they get back - decided just to ignore them :)
@@BeardedTinker Please take note of that the filter part must come under the normal logger part. No clue why that is. Like this: # Example configuration.yaml entry logger: default: error logs: # Multiscrape integratie errors als er even geen internet verbinding is custom_components.multiscrape.sensor: fatal custom_components.multiscrape.binary_sensor: fatal custom_components.multiscrape.entity: fatal # Macbook Air homeassistant.components.script.macbook_air_shutdown: fatal # Ubuntu shutdown script error onderdrukking als Ubuntu zelf niet gestart was homeassistant.components.script.ubuntu_22_04_shutdown_dupliceren: fatal # NL Translation homeassistant.helpers.translation: fatal # Log level for ESPHome connection section aioesphomeapi.connection: fatal # Log level for ESPHome reconnect section aioesphomeapi.reconnect_logic: warning filters: aioesphomeapi.reconnect_logic: - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for bluetooth-zolder" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for led-test" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for tempsensor" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for bluetooth-1st-floor" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for zehnder-rf" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for ttgo-display" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for co2-woonkamer" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for co2-slaapkamer" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for vindriktning-i" - "Can't connect to ESPHome API for vindriktning-ii" homeassistant.components.brother: - "Timeout fetching brother data" homeassistant.components.esphome: - "Error getting initial data for 192.168.178.115" - "Error getting initial data for 192.168.178.112" homeassistant.components.esphome.dashboard: - "Error requesting ESPHome Dashboard data: Cannot connect to host 127.0.0.1:62039 ssl:default" - "Dashboard unavailable; skipping reauth: Cannot connect to host 127.0.0.1:62039 ssl:default" - "Error requesting ESPHome Dashboard data"