Keeping as much information and control as possible local is a great goal. And one that I strongly endorse. Obviously, you want the irrigation to continue to operate as long as water and power to open the valves is available.
With more information, it can do a better job. So yes, a directly connected flow meter would allow it to discover in low-latency real time that the zone is not drawing water, or that it is drawing way more water than expected. Especially if that sensor is inline with only the irrigation. Then it could take some actions immediately like calling for help, shutting off the zone, and whatever else makes sense.
I do wish that Flume would allow their data stream to be stored locally rather than operating always and entirely in the cloud. My understanding is that its base station component stores some amount of data during network disruption, and will forward it to the cloud when connections are restored. I haven’t noticed significant data loss during times when I’ve had network connection issues, so that seems plausible. That base station does need power, and I really ought to put mine on a UPS one of these days.
But not all benefits require real-time connections. If the network is alive and Flume’s servers are responding, then it could tie the watering schedule to Flume’s data in a way that would allow historical review. Or perhaps feed actual irrigation event information to Flume to better tune their alerts and analysis tools. I’m not sure I care where the analysis gets done.
Having a smarter and connected irrigation system does make some of that easier to do by hand, to be fair. If I can review the recent runs with time stamps for start and stop of each zone, then I can open a second window on the Flume data and plot those times. I could export the raw Flume data for each run, and use a spreadsheet to visualize the real water usage over weeks of usage.
But it would be so much nicer if all of that were automated so that the reports are something I don’t have to create by hand. Even better, reports that simply turn up in a weekly email, reassuring me that all is well.