Add "events" to history graphs to show cause-and-effect

[Grayda]

Describe your idea

It's cold in my room, so I turned the heater on. To work out the temperature increase, I looked at the graph for my temperature sensor. And while I did see an increase, I don't remember exactly when I turned my heater on. Yes I could look at when I turned my heater on via Developer Tools > States (or Settings > Devices) and then go back to the graph, but it'd be nice to be able to make relationships between entities so you could see what effect X has on Y.

My idea is to let you "link" states and entity events to entities. You'd set them up similarly to triggers for automations and when viewing historical graphs, they'll show up so you can mouse over them and see what happened at that moment.

Why is this exciting?

This would let people do things like primitive energy usage tracking. For example if you've got a vibration sensor on your dryer, and a Rainforest Eagle-200 that measures your total home electricity usage, you could link the sensor to the dryer, then look at your energy consumption and see "vibration detected at 5pm, energy usage went up 2 kW/h" to know what effect something has on something else.

Potential use cases

• Link a window sensor to a temperature sensor and see when you opened the window and what effect it had on the inside temperature
• Link a a few sensors (e.g. vibration sensor, zigbee socket etc.) to an energy sensor to see on your energy dashboard a correlation between the sensor being in some kind of state, with an increase or decrease in energy
• Allow you to see on a temperature sensor when you turned the AC on or off so you don't have to cross-reference with other sensors
• Let people view more details about their home data to nail down problems (e.g. link your heater to your air quality sensor to see what effect it has on your PM2.5 readings, or link your SpeedTest integration with your qBittorrent integration to see if your ISP is shaping your internet or something)

Anything else?

Here's a simple mockup. Stuff would appear maybe as a vertical line, or maybe a dot along the line, and mousing over it would show the change in state that caused the line or dot to appear.

Binary sensors, basic events and simple true / false comparisons would work best. For example, "door open", "room occupancy > 3", "camera motion detected", "humidity < 50%", "helper is on AND TV is on" so you don't get a line / dot every time the temperature increases by 0.1 degrees or whatever.

[cvroque]

I really like this idea and I believe a more approachable implementation would be to show these entities events inside a graph instead of linking entities directly.

A nice example would be how native climate devices show up:

Notice how the heat "event" is displayed and easily understood at a glance. I believe some of your use cases could be satisfied by creating a template climate entity that would show up just like the example above.

Now, if the interface could do something similar when I filter different entities, such as a washing machine and a power plug:

In this case, the "event" is show in a bar completely separated from the graph we want to see.

It would be a huge improvement to see it show up inside the graph in the history panel and also graph cards.