0.23.20, Fewer False Alarms and Ready for Home Assistant 2026.10

Twenty-one releases have shipped since 0.22.29, and together they make Device Sentinel quieter and more accurate. Tim Plas reviewed the dashboard and tested the outage work in his own house, and BeardedTinker reported issue #16 with a working patch. Thank you both.

Before you update: this release deletes the folder www/device_sentinel/ and everything in it. Copy anything you want from it first.

One Alert for One Outage

Device Sentinel tells you about an outage once when its cause is a hub, broker, or integration outage. When your Zigbee coordinator, MQTT broker, an integration or your Wi-Fi goes down, Device Sentinel reports the outage and waits until it ends before it judges the devices behind it again. On one house, a four-hour Zigbee2MQTT outage had produced 24 "stopped reporting" alerts the moment the bridge came back. A device that stays silent after the outage is still reported, once its own normal reporting time has passed, and a restart in the middle of an outage changes nothing.

Device Sentinel announces a recovery only when a device reports again. A restart, a reconnect or the end of an outage never counts as a device coming back.

Batteries Read by the Week

Device Sentinel reads each battery by its weekly average, so a cell that wobbles by half a point no longer reads as falling. On one house, seven cells near full had read as falling.

Device Sentinel finds the day a battery starts dying faster. A battery that will run out within your Days Till Empty goes on your Problem List as accelerating, so you can replace it before it dies. Each device's page shows its last five weekly averages.

One Problem for a Device That Keeps Dropping Out

A device that keeps dropping off your network and recovering becomes one problem: "Door tilt sensor: flapping, dropped out 5 times since 7:00 AM". Your phone hears when it starts and when it stops, where a door sensor in Tim Plas's shed had sent 53 alerts in 17 hours.

Your Reports Stay Private

Your Daily Brief and reports move behind Home Assistant's sign-in. Home Assistant serves its www folder to anyone who asks, and the pages Device Sentinel wrote there named your devices, battery levels and outage times. Your brief moves to config/device_sentinel/daily_brief.html, and the dashboard's Battery Trends and Signal Trends replace the old pages. Your diagnostics file hides MAC and network addresses, so you can attach it to a GitHub issue safely.

Ready for Home Assistant 2026.10

Your log will stay clean after you update to Home Assistant 2026.10. Until 2026.8, a device could belong to several integrations at once, and Device Sentinel learned which integration a device belonged to by reading two fields: config_entries and primary_config_entry. Home Assistant 2026.8 gave each device a single integration and one field to name it, config_entry_id, and from 2026.10 Home Assistant writes a warning to your log if an integration reads the two old fields. Device Sentinel begins to read config_entry_id instead, and Home Assistant 2026.5 and later remain supported.

Also in This Release

Muting a device is silent, where it used to send a "recovered" notification.

Long Home Assistant stops, clock changes and daylight saving no longer cause false alerts or a missing or doubled brief.

A device whose connection fails goes on your Problem List by name, such as a SwitchBot, TP-Link or Brother device.

Your Daily Brief can arrive through the email action Home Assistant introduced in 2026.8.

Device Sentinel starts even with damaged saved data, and runs lighter: on a house with a year of history, its minute check fell from 178 to 24 milliseconds.

A more accurate freeze alert is in testing. Device Sentinel learns a second rhythm for each device and records where it would disagree with the one in use, so it can prove itself on real houses before it judges your devices.

Extended Diagnostics covers Z-Wave, Matter, Philips Hue, SmartThings, Tuya and Lutron Caséta, and Device Sentinel keeps each device's firmware history. Send your diagnostics file to help build support for your hardware.

Upgrading

Update and restart, then reload your browser page. Your learned rhythms, battery history, and signal history are safe. The first start deletes www/device_sentinel/, and a dashboard card pointed at one of its pages will stop working. A battery needs two weeks of history before it can read as falling, and four before it can read as accelerating.