Maintenance page - dashboard? else?

[laupalombi]

This is a discussion from a product person wanting more input.

The need I feel is clear (but feel free to comment to add to it). Have one place where the admin can:

• Check needed updates, repaires, etc. - take those things away from Home
• Check battery levels of things needing change
• Check unavailable devices - might need repairing

This is not a discussion about needing this, but where it should be

There are several ways this could take shape:

• A new built in Dashboard, like Climate, Security, etc. but making sure the actions are always admin-only (ex. a nonadmin can know if something battery is low, cannot change it). Can see unavailable devices but not configure them, etc .If this is technically impossible, I'd rather have this admin-only.
  Pros:
  -- This new dashboard is built with the dashboard engine and that should be fast.
  -- Could live in a tab next to Home in the Overview dashboard.
  ** Cons**:
  -- This is not a configuration page, but a "settings" page, which makes it weird if you get used to making your maintenance in a dashboard, but then anything else happens at Settings level.
  -- We will struggle to scale this dashboard because at some point things will not be manageable by a dashboard - for example which automations are breaking frequently. Its "fastest now" but later we might need to migrate it to other place still.

• A new "Settings-Maintenance" page (hierarchy tbd) outside dashboards
  Pros:
  -- It doesn't need to be hidden; we can still link it from the Overview dashboard like we are currently doing with repairs etc.
  -- Its way more scalable and makes more sense in terms of hierarchy
  Cons:
  -- The team in charge of Set up HA is pretty full and might take a bit to push this initiative; also harder to contribute if it is outside a dashboard, and ground rules are harder to get.

This is tricky, because I feel the need is there (please back me up or correct me) but It is important that we place it in the right place. If we don't, we might need to change where everything Maintenance is a couple times around, and considering this is not urgent I would rather not do that.

What do you think?

[laupalombi]

There is a PR to create a dashboard for batteries too home-assistant/frontend#30372

[mik-laj]

I'd lean towards starting with a dashboard, even if the long-term home is a Settings page. If there are resource constraints, making some progress is better than waiting for the perfect solution. The harder part is the infrastructure - deciding what to surface, how to collect it, and what the experience should feel like. Once that's figured out, moving it to a different place in the UI is relatively straightforward.

It's also worth bringing the Repairs section into this conversation. It could naturally be part of a maintenance story, but right now it's scoped to issues requiring immediate action - which limits its usefulness for the kind of ongoing maintenance concerns we're talking about here. Whether that means expanding Repairs or building something alongside it feels like an important question to settle early.

I've also been discussing what metrics would actually be worth surfacing in a place like this - including automations referencing dead entities, backup destination storage, Zigbee network health, and more. Happy to connect the dots if useful: home-assistant/architecture#1326

[Hedda]

• A new built in Dashboard, like Climate, Security, etc. but making sure the actions are always admin-only (ex. a nonadmin can know if something battery is low, cannot change it). Can see unavailable devices but not configure them, etc .If this is technically impossible, I'd rather have this admin-only.

Oh, I would really love for a better default way to somehow expose and highlight to non-admins batteries needing to be replaced now or soon.

[timmo001]

I worked on a custom maintenance dashboard last week, it was based on my own requirements mostly for the need to know what batteries were low etc.

It's not something that would be a final product and has way more than the project would ever want, hence why it's custom and not a real contribution. It may have some good nuggets in the implementation that could be considered here. Most of it is probably thought of already, but may generate some inspiration.

More details on my rationale and thoughts explained in my comment here at the point where this PR was a battery subview of home overview. This is currently being refactored to a full maintenance dashboard and is a good base to iterate on top of.