You can do what field techs call a “wellness check” which is where you have something poll the device once a day or once a week and then you just manually review that report to see that everything is doing what you expect it to.
Don’t go crazy with this and poll many times a day. Zigbee and Z wave are just not intended for that. Too much polling will run down the battery on a battery powered device and create traffic jams on your network for all devices. Your lightbulb might miss a turn on or turn off command because it was busy answering the question of whether it was still connected! So do it sparingly. But a once a day wellness check should be fine.
Several community members have written their own smartapps to do this kind of wellness check. One of the most popular also has the most features, and can report on lightbulbs and other mains-powered devices as well. I especially like this one because instead of polling the device each time, it looks at the logs for the last recorded event rather than sending a new question to the device. That helps lighten the load on your network considerably.
For those who haven’t used custom code before, see the following FAQ. But it’s pretty simple.
