Device monitoring

Vacation rental device monitoring

Every device screen answers “what is device X doing?” Nobody arrives with that question. They arrive with “is the house OK?” — and answering it usually means reassembling one fact out of forty tiles.

Homatic opens on the answer instead. The default view of a property is a summary: anything wrong, then the state of each system. The device list is still there, one click down, for when you already know what you are looking for.

What counts as an alert

Every alert is an objective fact a device reported. There is no scoring, no risk model, and no threshold invented in code:

Alert	What the device said
Lock jammed	The deadbolt tried to throw and could not — typically against the strike plate
Smoke / CO	An alarm reported smoke or carbon monoxide
Leak / water	A leak sensor went wet
Valve closed	A water shutoff valve is closed
Offline	Silent for more than two hours
Low battery	At or below 20%
Behaviour change	A device that still answers has stopped behaving like itself

Alerts are grouped by kind, deliberately. Three low-battery sensors listed one per row push a real leak off the screen; collapsed into one row, they do not.

The six systems

Below the alerts is a grid: security, climate, lighting, safety, energy, and anything that fits none of them. It exists for the ordinary day when nothing is wrong — which is exactly when an alerts-only screen goes blank and stops being worth opening.

A system with no devices is omitted rather than drawn empty. A tile reading “—” on every property without an energy monitor is worse than no tile.

Climate is always shown as information, never as “OK”. We do not know your target comfort, so a green tick there would be a claim we cannot support.

“A device stopped behaving like itself”

The hardest failure is the one that does not look like a failure. A motion sensor that answers every poll, reports a valid state, and has quietly stopped detecting anything is online by every conventional check.

Homatic compares each device against its own history rather than a global threshold, and states the observation instead of a cause: this sensor reported motion on 11 of the last 14 days and none in the last 3. It does not say the battery is dying or the device has moved, because it cannot know that. It says what changed, and lets you decide.

Portfolio-wide, not one property at a time

Properties are found, not scrolled. Search ranks a name match above any other field and collates numbers properly, so “Unit 12” does not sort before “Unit 2”, and every row says why it matched — otherwise answering “harbor” with “Unit 12” reads as a bug.

Units group into buildings, so a portfolio spread across four addresses can be filtered to one of them. Buildings carry their own address, because two “Building A”s in different states are otherwise indistinguishable.

Device history, where the question is asked

A card is a snapshot; the question is usually “is that normal?” Opening a device’s details charts the last day, week or fortnight — a sparkline for numbers, a state timeline for open/closed, wet/dry, locked/unlocked, with time spent in each state and how often it changed.

Leak sensors default to a week rather than a day. A leak sensor that reported nothing in 24 hours is one doing its job, and a 24-hour frame is empty on every healthy one.