That's because (I believe) Hubitat is a software company at their core and have focused their efforts on drivers and automation software (IMO). This is evident in the continued evolution of apps like Rule Machine and Basic Rules while it feels like the dashboard app has been considered "good enough." And I'm OK with that. I bought my HE because of its automation capabilities, not because it could draw pretty pictures.
BUT, I do want pretty pictures! And I believe (perhaps without merit) that the hardware (and probably the software) can handle some very basic graphing. I've got an idea I want to try out. Maybe in a couple days I'll have something that meets my needs and possibly helps others too.
I want to post a more extensive comment, but essentially I agree with both the desire to have built-in graphing options, but I can also appreciate the complexity and overhead in providing this across all potential HE setups that may want to make us of such a feature.
This hub kinda supports graphing. These is a community app that still works (although the author has stopped supporting it). Or you can set up Grafana.
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This was created using Grafana which is pulling data from an InfluxDB database. The InfluxDB gets its data from the Hubitat integration within Home Assistant. Grafana and InfluxDB are also running as addons in Home Assistant.
Not all of us have the familiarity with this stuff that some on here seem to have. I have NO CLUE how anyone would do the above.
I presume Granfana is software. Don't know what it runs on.
No idea what an Influx DB database is, or what it runs on.
Apparently the Influx gets its data from a Hubitat /Home Assistant integration. I bought Hubitat INSTEAD of Home Assistant - I could not figure out what hardware I needed for HA, and even if I did, the instructions for setting that up convinced me I had no business delving into that - now I'm being told that to get graphs of data from my Hubitat I have to buy the competitions device...
I saw the other post about pulling data in a text file being trivial. It is not trivial to me. Is there perhaps some other add on or download or whatever Hubitat calls them that I download to pull out text files or that will dump the data to Google sheets? I suppose once the data is in Google sheets I could teach myself how to make graphs in Google sheets (i'm presuming it does that - people where I work make graphs in Excel, and GS is a competitor, so I'm presuming, but...)
I bought the Hubitat because it is a smarthome device to which I could connect Zwave and Zigbee devices and Hubitat supposedly comes ready to work out of the box. It does not seem like it to me.
Perhaps the Hubitat is just not the device for me. I read about it and was very excited to buy it, but every single time I want to do something it turns into 2-3 hour Google search.
I can feel your frustrations, it's exciting to take on a new platform and make best use of it's features. My take on HE is that there is a strong focus on three things, device connectivity, automating the home and the user experience in achieving these outcomes. By focus, I mean both in terms of the features offerred but also continued work in expanding the offering in these spaces.
Again my take on your situation would be that Hubitat prefer to focus their time on developing automation solutions for us, rather than analytical visualisation solutions that can be provided in more feature rich offerings elsewhere. If my interpretation of Hubitat's approach (and I could be wrong) is right, I to a large extent agree. They, and the HE hub are here to provide local control and automation of our home.
That said, I would like to see some basic charting as a built in feature, but am willing to wait.
I'd like to spend more time responding to your influxdb / Grafana questions, as I have these setup on a raspberry pi to then provide charta on my he dashboards. Hopefully others can offer their experience in this space... While I get my dinner
It does come ready to work but it just doesn't have a feature you want built in. There is no one ring to rule them all (Hubitat does come close though). As @sburke781 points out, Hubitat concentrates on devices and automation. They do realize however that others may want more and that is why they have an open API for developers to graph things. I still very much use Hubigraph for some things (especially for gauges) and it works perfectly fine. The code is open for change. Now I understand that you feel it may be beyond you but with a few questions from the very helpful people here and the willingness to learn, I'm sure you can get what you want running.
All well said in response, as well as your validating his frustration quotient. It is a natural thing to want to do something with the data collected right there within HE, and it doesn't HAVE to be a "rich" offering, just some offering. Same with the Dashboard facilities. Done with the argument that... "it just doesn't belong on HE".
You've got $500 phones that have the capabilities & storage of systems many old timers worked on that (all total) cost upwards of a million dollars at one time. You could have argued back then that A LOT OF THAT didn't belong on a flippin phone. But wow, it's there and it's nice.
And here's his key line -
Nor do they have the desire or time to....and that's a evergreen decision that I guess the HE folk address every time they lift the lid to work on the platform; that is, to meet these folks "in the middle" or to go "a little further towards" total HA platform built-in capabilities.
EDIT: Now setting my egg timer to clock how long it takes to close this thread down.
webCoRE: Invested about 2 hours attempting to get it to work. No idea what I'm doing wrong. I'm willing to put SOME time into this, but more than 2 hours with no idea of how much more just to graphically view my own data that the device already has in 2022 seems excessive. atm this seems to be the only applicable solution for me, but I have not had the time...
Quick Chart:
From the link:
Note: This uses the free quickchart.io backend. No signups necessary, but does require the internet to work.
I bought the Hubitat specifically because I understood it claims to not need an internet connection, and it operates totally locally. I'm not going to spend time trying to get something to work that needs internet, when my goal is to disconnect my home automation from the internet. As I write this it occurs to me that webCoRE probably also needs internet to operate....
It's on me that I did not research more to figure out it can't do basic graphing, but honestly it never occurred to me that in 2022 anyone would sell a device that purports to be a Home Automation hub, that is the hub to automate and collect data from Zwave and Zigbee devices, and the device would not include some level of basic graphical interface for all that data...
I went with HE instead of HA specifically because I could buy an affordable HE device that supposedly comes preloaded with software - "pay, plug & play". For HA, I was going to have to spend additional time figuring out what device I needed and how to load an HA OS and the HA software. So I bought HE. Then I got it and figured out that to get almost anything I needed to work I have to download added software...not so hard and I figured out how to do it, but seems unnecessarily complicated for a "pay, plug & play" device.
If memory on the HE is an issue, I would happily have paid $20 more so they can put more memory in the thing....I've wasted 100's of multiples of that in time trying to figure this out.
webCoRE does not require the internet to create or run pistons, the graphing module does, I believe, use an external source.
As to the rest of your dialog, HE's niche is local home automation using ZWave and Zigbee protocols, not reporting, not graphics... That's all they've ever claimed to do, and I personally believe they do it well. The community has chosen to provide the means to extend that niche capability, but that does not obligate HE to support that expansion of scope.
Nothing in the advertising of HE nor in it's documentation even mentions graphing. I will also say graphing is much more complicated than just more memory. There is processing power, then coding. Hence why when using influxdb+grafana or using quickchart.io that processing is offloaded to a different system. HE is for home automation, the ability to have charts is not required for home automation or any home automation unit. Hubitat also does do 100% of it's automation locally and directly supports that local automation. The only cloud things it supports and is minimal are echo/google integrations and that is only one way and does not effect automations within hubitat. For anyone who does want certain cloud integrations, they left that open so the community can code for it. For instance, I use a WeatherFlow Tempest as a weather station. I want automation based on it but in my design I don't rely on those automation for exactly the reason that the integration is cloud based not local. I use echo speaks, that requires cloud at the moment and I could set up a rpi to handle the back end (which all of us may require soon) but again, that's on us as the end user because Hubitat made no such claims that would work. So in the end complaining that a product doesn't have a feature that you feel it should without giving any thought to what would have to go into making happen doesn't change anything. It's like the guy some months back insisting that they put in an additional bulb that changed colors because it only cost .001 cents without regard for the fact that it would be expensive as hell to retool the factory, get recertification from Silicon Labs, and recertification from the FCC....
FWIW, there are plenty of local graphing options for Hubitat. Lots of people use influxdb + grafana. Others use node-red.
Personally, I don’t have major need for graphing, so I use Node-Red for the small amount of HVAC graphing I do. And, to be clear, that graphing isn’t needed for my HVAC automations. It’s just a little lagniappe ….
This may be a minor point.... That has no material impact...
But I would argue that I took an ever so slightly softer approach to requesting to see charts of some description in HE. Just because a very different product-line choose to implement something similar, I think, does not mean we can draw comparisons. Phone manufacturers / OS developers like Google or Apple have many more developers, money and negotiating clout compared to Hubitat when considering what they can incorporate in their product offering which, I expect, can then filter down to smaller players who leverage their platform, i.e. cheaper phones.
So I don't look down on Hubitat for not having chosen to include charts in their platform while unrelated products have chosen to... I only respectfully request that they add this capability if they can, while enjoying the creative fun it introduces in the Community to provide an alternative, i.e. engagement between developers and other users of HE, fostered by people like @bptworld and @thebearmay, amongst others. I can only hope their efforts may end up like they have for Kasa products and the Bond bridge being integrated into the official HE offering.
I'm only asking for people to temper their thoughts on this topic, not to completely dismiss that they can receive similar options through other products... it is completely understandable to come to the table with these comparisons. I only request that people use these as a carrot... not a stick.... if you know what I mean...
I would be interested in this. From what little I understand from what I have read, all of those solutions require additional hardware that must be purchased, connected, set up with an OS, have software installed, etc. I would be thrilled if I've misunderstood that and there is something i can install onto the Hubitat to get graphing. If so I'd really appreciate a link the describes how to do it. If not, and it requires a bunch of hardware, I figure if I'm going to that trouble I'll just move to HA. For all I know it has equally as many challenges, but won't know until I try.
Those two solutions mentioned do require another always-on server running on your LAN.
Count me among the group of users that would appreciate having a built-in solution for basic graphing of device events, but IMHO it's a "nice-to-have" feature, not essential.
Since I'm such a Google Docs nut, I must mention that you can publish charts from within Google Spreadsheets, which gives you an "Image" URL that displays a graphic view of the updated data! (That is, if the underlying data in the spreadsheet changes, the chart will be automatically updated every time it gets served to your browser/widget/dashboard/etc.)
Once you've created a chart from said data in GS, use its ••• menu to "Publish Chart..." > Link > "As Image" and copy the resulting URL. Use that URL to define a graphic element in your Dashboard, and voilà!!
The beauty of this method is that your chart can include multiple datasets, editable axes, trend lines, etc. all derived from the Google Spreadsheet, where the heavy lifting is done. No need to employ a 3rd party database or graphing utility.
