Find Missing Entities in Home Assistant

The longer I run Home Assistant, the more I find that I have missing, unavailable, and orphaned entities and services.

It's hard to keep tabs on all the changes that happen when an integration or add-on is updated. Sometimes changes to entities or services are required. Even though things might continue to work because the update did some magic in the background to fix the entities, it leaves the old stuff orphaned. In other cases, something will break, and finding out what entity or service caused it is not obvious.

The answer to this is to use an add-on/integration like "The Watchman". The Watchman is a custom integration for Home Assistant that collects information on all entities in your config files. In addition, it collects information on services in the HA service registry. The integration checks the state and creates a report of those that are unavailable or missing.

Getting a list of the problematic services and entities can be in the form of a text table, an alert via a service such as Telegram, or displayed in a markdown in Home Assistant.

Installing The Watchman is simple. It can be installed via an HACS integration in Home Assistant. After installing and rebooting, install the watchman integration on the Home Assistant integration page. See the video for the walk-through.

At the start of filming the video, I had 522 missing entities. That might be a bit overwhelming. Not to worry, there are filtering options in the integration that can make that list a bit smaller. Filtering by entities and services, entity states, and even files can be configured via the integration configure page. Filtering is useful if The Watchman is showing false positives. In those cases, just apply filtering to ignore those.

The Watchman is not a replacement for the Home Assistant Repair Center. I think it augments it nicely. For example, none of the missing entities or services show up in the repair center currently. It doesn't mean that sometime in the future, the Home Assistant team won't incorporate the same checks but for now, I need both to keep my Home Assistant systems running smoothly.

I go over all this and more in my related video. Be sure to take a look and subscribe! You can even join the channel if you want to support what I do. I would super duper appreciate either!

Thanks for reading and watching!