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Home Assistant Automation Trace Locator

Pure frontend: paste the automation YAML, optionally with the trace JSON, and the tool walks the four stages - trigger, condition, action, mode - to point at the stuck one and what to check at each. No data leaves the browser. Good for "stopped halfway" and "fires only sometimes".

The two most common complaints about Home Assistant automations - "it does not trigger" and "it only works half the time" - boil down to four places where something actually gets stuck: the trigger never fires, a condition does not pass, the action errors out, or the mode swallows the new trigger. The built-in trace panel can show what really happened at each step, but the fields are dense and hard to follow if you are not used to them. This tool fixes the order of investigation into a four-step path, flags structural problems in the YAML first, and points at the most suspicious stage.

The four stages and where things get stuck

Stage What a stuck one looks like What to check
1 trigger No trigger record for this automation in the log at all missing trigger / wrong entity / for not elapsed / invalid trigger type
2 condition It triggered but the action did not run; one condition is marked failed in the trace which condition failed (time, state, template); values are often reversed or the timezone is off
3 action The action step is marked as an error in the trace entity name typo, service name not in domain.service form, undefined template variable
4 mode With fast triggers only the first one ever runs mode single drops the new trigger while the previous run is still going; consider restart or queued

Trace locator

Paste the automation YAML, optionally the trace JSON, and click Locate:

Honest note

This is a static heuristic locator: it only reasons about what you pasted, in the order structural completeness, then the four-stage checklist. It does not reach your server, does not simulate the runtime, and does not connect to the internet. It tells you which order to check in; which step actually broke is decided by the trace panel in Home Assistant and the log file.