Diagnostics
From time to time, we may ask you to collect information in logs or open the system to remote connection in order to fix an issue. You are always in control of what you share, and nothing here is on by default.
Analytics and diagnostics
In Settings you will find an Analytics and Diagnostics panel with a set of switches. Each one covers a different kind of information: your devices, any that are not responding, recent errors, system resources, and how long things have been running. They are all off to begin with, and you choose which, if any, to turn on. When one is on, that information is shared with Sensa to help us support you. Turning a switch off stops it again.
The health of the hardware itself
With diagnostics switched on, your system also sends a short reading of how the unit itself is doing: its temperature, how hard it is working, whether its storage has stopped accepting writes, and a count of the times the hardware has complained about its power supply, its temperature or its memory card.
Those are the things that predict a unit failing, and they usually show up well before anything looks wrong on screen. An underfed power supply in particular behaves exactly like a software fault, so knowing about it saves everybody a long hunt in the wrong place.
Two things worth saying about it:
- It is the same consent. It travels only while you have diagnostics switched on, and it stops the moment you switch them off, along with everything else.
- It is counts and readings, never your log. We count the four kinds of complaint listed above. The messages themselves stay on your unit.
This part is gathered separately from the rest, so it keeps arriving from a system whose Home Assistant will not start. That is exactly the system somebody is stuck with, and the one where a diagnostic is worth having.
None of that is what tells you about it. On a Sensa appliance the unit also watches its own temperature and power for your benefit, and that half never leaves the vehicle and has nothing to do with these switches. It is what the Core temperature instinct reads, and it works whether diagnostics are on or off. The same two readings appear as CPU Temp and Core Power bars on the Diagnostics tab, under the usage bars, so you can see them without waiting for something to go wrong. Both rows are left out on a system Sensa did not supply, where there is no such reading to take. What these switches govern is only whether a copy also comes to us.
The Settings log
Settings has its own Log tab, and it is where your system talks about itself: backups taken or failed, software updates installed, licence check-ins, restores, and devices added or removed.
There are two logs, and both tabs are called Log. What tells them apart is which dashboard they are on, and their icon. The one on Intelligence is your van talking (low water, a warning from an instinct); the one on Settings is the system talking (last night's backup, this morning's update). See the Intelligence Log.
They read and work the same way, with the same information, warning and error markers and the same filter chips. Clearing one leaves the other alone.
Anything worth telling you about still reaches you the same way, wherever it was written. A failed backup raises a notification exactly as it did before.
How long your logs are kept
Both logs keep 14 days of history to begin with. Change it on the Settings, Diagnostics tab, in the Analytics and Diagnostics panel: Keep log history for takes a number of days.
Enter 0 to keep everything. Either way your system only ever holds a bounded number of entries, so a busy week cannot fill your storage. What you are choosing here is how far back you can look, not how much room the log is allowed.
Remote support
If a problem is easier for us to look at directly, we may ask you to let us connect to your system remotely. The switch is on the Sensa Settings panel, under the System tab, and it stays off until you turn it on. Turn it off again once we are done, and the session ends immediately.
An open session closes itself as well, after a set number of hours, so you cannot accidentally leave the door open.
This is separate from your own remote access. Letting us in does not switch yours on, and yours being on does not let us in.
While we are connected, you can see it
Support access is never silent. For as long as a session is open:
- A banner sits across every screen, on every dashboard, saying we can reach your system and until when. Tapping it takes you straight to the switch that closes it. It is not dismissible, because it is describing a state rather than announcing an event, and it clears itself the moment the session ends.
- Your Settings Log records it, when it opened and when it closed, and whether it ended because you closed it or because the time ran out. The opening entries are marked as warnings so they stand out from routine system messages.
If we open it rather than you
Sometimes the thing that is wrong is the thing stopping you reaching the switch. In that case we can open a session from our end, and it is labelled as ours rather than yours: the banner reads "Sensa has opened support access to this system", and the Log entry and the panel both carry the reason the engineer gave and the name of the person who opened it.
You can close it from the switch exactly as you would close your own, and it expires by itself in the same way.
We can only do it while you have a fault reported with us. There has to be a support case of yours that is still open, and the reason recorded on your system comes from that case. A case we have already answered does not count: if we need to come back in, somebody reopens it first. So this is not a door we can open whenever we like, it is one that exists while you are waiting on us for something.
Closing the case closes the session. When the case is marked finished at our end, your system is told to shut the session down at its next check-in rather than leaving it open for the rest of its window.
We email you when we do it. The email goes to the address on your Sensa account, at the moment we ask your system to let us in. It is sent from our end rather than from the van on purpose: a session opened this way is usually a session opened because your Home Assistant will not start, and a message that depends on the broken thing is no message at all. It tells you how long the access lasts rather than a clock time, because your system picks the request up at its next check-in and clamps the window itself.
You can refuse it outright. In your Sensa account, under Control and then Deployments, you can tell us never to open support on a system without checking with you first. It applies to that system, it holds until you change it, and we cannot override it. The Admin tab on the van shows where you stand:
If your system is too broken for you to reach this switch, we can open support for a fault you have reported. We always email you when we do. You can change that in mySensa.
If you have refused, it says that instead. If you have never been asked, because your system has not checked in since the setting existed, it says nothing at all rather than putting a position in your mouth.
If we become aware that a device on your system is behaving dangerously, we may act to shut down or restrict that equipment. That is limited to stopping the thing at risk. It does not entitle us to sign in and use your system generally, and it does not override a refusal above.
If your support plan or your licence has ended
You can still let us in. A system whose plan has lapsed, or whose licence has expired and gone read-only, is exactly the system somebody is stuck with, and cutting off the help makes sorting it out harder for everybody. So the remote support switch keeps working, and the connection it needs is held open for the session whatever state your licence is in.
Your own remote access is the half that stops, because that is part of what you pay for. Renewing brings it straight back.
If there is no switch to turn on
On a small number of early systems the remote support account was never created, so there is nothing for the switch to work. Rather than showing you a control that does nothing, the panel says so:
Remote support is not set up on this system, so there is nothing to turn on. Contact Sensa if you need an engineer to look at it.
Nothing else is affected, and everything on this page about your own remote access still applies. Get in touch and we will sort it out.