The Home Assistant Logbook

Here is a quick overview of how I use the Home Assistant Logbook for troubleshooting my automations and figuring out new ideas for things to automate.

The logbook has been around FOREVER. It was an early component built by Paulus himself when Home Assistant first came out. It was a reverse chronological account of the automations and events happening in your smart home.

With the latest Nabu Casa subscription, you can even get reporting on commands issued from your Amazon echoes.

I have always been a huge fan of the logbook for troubleshooting. A stray light turns on at 2 am, you can review the logbook and discover if something triggered it at 1:59 am and then adjust your automations or automation logic as needed. It is a great way to really understand how Home Assistant is acting and reacting to it’s surroundings and sensors.

The ability to click on the blue links and go directly to history is also a huge plus. Using this and filtering, you can determine all available states of a particular entity and then program automation and logic for it.

Since almost all integrations use the logbook, it can sometimes get cluttered with sensors that report every minute (like time or uptime) so you can use YAML to exclude certain sensors from logging. This has the advantage of keeping your logbook useful as well as keeping your database sizes smaller.

The Home Assistant logbook is a powerful tool for any home automator looking for insights and details around sensors and automations. The logbook often answers the ‘Why’ something turned on or didn’t in our Smart Home.

Happy Automating!
– Carlo