Live Data Flow

Live data flow and traffic heat

Animated messages

Whenever a Matter device and Home Assistant exchange a message, a dot travels along the route on the map:

Dot	Meaning	Example
Cyan	A device reports something to Home Assistant	a power reading, a window opening, a button press, a light that changed
Magenta	Home Assistant sends a command to a device	light.turn_on, switch.toggle, cover.open_cover

A ring flashes around the sender. The dot moves hop by hop (about half a second per hop) from the device via its parent and further routers to the border router – or the other way round for commands.

Which route is shown?

The route is the most likely one, calculated from the routing tables the routers last reported:

1. A battery device or end device talks to its parent router.
2. A router with a usable direct link to the border router (link quality 2 or 3) sends directly.
3. Otherwise the message follows the next hop from the router's routing table, until it reaches the border router.

Thread chooses routes itself and can change them at any time. The animation is therefore an estimate, not a recording of radio packets.

What is not shown

• Thread's own background traffic: routers exchanging status about every 30 seconds, battery devices polling their parent, retransmissions, acknowledgements
• Traffic of devices that are not Matter devices in Home Assistant
• Messages between devices that do not involve Home Assistant

Seeing real radio traffic would need a second Thread radio as a sniffer, Wireshark and the network key.

Several messages at once

A single radio message often updates several entities in Home Assistant (e.g. power, current and voltage of a plug). Thread Pulse shows them as one dot when they arrive within 0.4 seconds.

Live ticker

The box in the bottom left of the map shows:

• Live · 41 messages in the last minute
• the three latest messages with time, device, what changed and – for confirmations of a command – the response time, e.g. Plug → HA: state off · 96 ms

Pausing

⏸ Pause live stops the animation (useful when the map gets busy). The counters for each device and the traffic heat keep counting in the background. ▶ Resume live starts the animation again.

Sound

Available from version 1.4.0.

🔇 Sound (in the ⋯ menu from version 1.6.0, before in the toolbar) plays a short, quiet tick for every animated message:

• high tone – a message to Home Assistant
• low tone – a command from Home Assistant

While sound is on, a volume slider appears next to the button (moving it plays a preview tick). Both settings are remembered by the browser.

• Sound is off by default.
• Browsers only allow sound after you clicked or tapped the page. If you left sound on, it starts with your first tap after opening the page.
• To keep it pleasant in a busy network, there are at least 0.15 seconds between two ticks and at most 5 ticks per second – not every message gets its own tick.
• While live is paused, there is no sound.
• The ambient mode has no toolbar and therefore no sound.

Traffic heat

With ≋ Traffic on (default), every link glows wider and brighter the more messages travelled over it in the last 10 minutes. The glow is drawn underneath the link, so the signal colour stays visible. Busy routes of your mesh stand out immediately – typically the links between the border router and the devices that report most often (plugs with power metering).

• Hover a link to see the number of messages, e.g. 41 messages in the last 10 min.
• In the detail panel of a router, Forwarded for others shows how many messages it passed on for other devices.
• Switch it off with ≋ Traffic off; the choice is remembered.

The heat is based on the same calculated routes as the animation, so it shows where traffic most likely flows.