Logging

Is it possible to have homey log all device events somehow? I have a couple of flows for my kitchen lights where a PIR sensor won’t play nice. The flows check the expiration of a timer which is re-initialized every time the PIR senses motion, but for some reason the lights sometimes don’t switch on or switch off even when there is motion detected, so I would like to check where it fails.

Out of the box: No.
But there are a few apps that can help.
Search the app store for ‘Simple Log’ or ‘Papertrails log’.

Hope one can do what you’re looking for :slight_smile:

Thanks, will give 'm a try!

Having problems with Papertrails though, shuts down Homey app, works on the backup site!

You also can use notification. That way you immediately see what is going on. I use it for those flows i want to monitor. Once it works i delete the notification. Logging al the flows in simple log or papertrails was somewhat overwhelming. Advantage; 1 app less😱

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But not everything sends notifications (like failed flows or unreachable devices), so that is only useful for debugging purposes etc.

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Absolutely right, ofcourse this goes also for papertrails and simple log. Failed flows only when it fails on the WHEN and AND part. At the THEN part it goes well🙃

When your device is unreachable you get your notification. That way you know your flow works and you can investigate further on

How reliable are notifications? Do these show up as OS driven notifications on the phone (thus extra communication through internet which suffers from unreliable timing)? I’ld rather do all logging on the homey itself if possible.

Anyway, I’ve been toying around with the developer interface, it looks like my z-wave based PIR is weak in its communication. I’ll try to move it to my domoticz controlled z-wave network which is proven to be pretty robust.

You can see the notifications on the timeline in the Homey app.
When pushing the notification you get the exact time the notification was made

Mja…, thanks. Seems like the time granularity on the notifications isn’t that good but I’ll give it a go anyway - it won’t hurt to try.

Click on a line to show the timestamp instead of passed time.

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Cool, I did not know that!

I’m using this too, but instead of adding and deleting notifications directly in the flows, I send the message in a text variable PushMessage to a debug notification flow.

The debug notification flow will send out the message if the z-Debug flag is active. See attachments.

After the flows work well, I just de-activate the debug flag.

Hope this helps.

PS in fact, in the example you can see I’m using a second variable OutMessage. This is useful as there is some delay when sending out notifications and other flows might fill PushMessage too before sending a notification.

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as a complete newbie on this platform I started creating my first flows and ran into the limitation of the debugging of flows too. After fiddling around with the notifications I soon ran into the rate_limit. Then I tried pushing messages to my MQTT broker in a debug/flow_id/ topic. With a MQTT Explorer you can immediately see the results.
This works very well!

Improved here (no rate limit on telegram):