Event timeline

The Events tab in the notification panel is a feed of what your home has actually been doing: the front door opening, a light going off, someone arriving home — each line with the time and, where Home Assistant knows it, who caused it.

Requirements

Events needs HKI 7 Cloud 0.9.0 or newer. Whole-domain rosters need 0.10.0.

Where the data comes from

The timeline reads Home Assistant's own logbook, live, over a logbook/event_stream subscription. It records nothing on the device.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. The recorder already saw what happened overnight while HKI was closed; a timeline whose history begins when you opened the app is missing precisely the events worth showing.

The subscription is only held while the tab is actually on screen.

Reading it

Raw entity states are phrased rather than shown as-is, so you get "Front door was opened" instead of binary_sensor.front_door: on. The wording is chosen from an entity's device class first and its domain second — device class being the more specific of the two and the one carrying the meaning, since a bare binary_sensor can only manage "was triggered" while the same entity marked as a door earns "was opened". Where Home Assistant phrases an event itself, that phrasing is used unchanged.

Time range

The timeline opens on the last 3 hours — it answers "what just happened", and a whole day of a busy household buries that under hundreds of older rows. 6h, 12h, 24h, 48h and 72h are one tap away for when the question really is about yesterday.

Filters

Events are labelled and filterable by what kind of thing they happened to — Doors, Windows, Motion, Lights, Locks. The filter row is built from what the timeline actually contains, so a household with no water sensors is never offered a Water filter that could only come back empty, and the categories are ordered by how much of the timeline each accounts for.

Grouping is by device class first and domain second, since binary_sensor alone covers doors, windows, motion and smoke and would otherwise pile all of them into one heap.

Days remain the list's own headings. A timeline that reorders itself by category stops being a timeline.

Setting it up (admins)

The roster is configured once for the whole household, under Settings › Family Sharing › Events — not on each phone, which is the difference between setting this up and setting it up eleven times.

The roster takes whole domains as well as named entities, so "every lock" is one choice rather than eleven. Domains are stored unexpanded and resolved against your entity list each time the timeline opens, which means a lock added next month joins the timeline on its own instead of the roster quietly meaning whatever existed the day it was set.

Because one domain can cover hundreds of entities, the roster editor shows what each one currently resolves to, and warns before a subscription would exceed what a phone should reasonably carry.

If nothing is being tracked yet, admins see a button straight to that screen; family members who cannot configure it are not shown a button that leads nowhere for them.

Hiding events from someone

An admin can take parts of the timeline away from individual family members — a whole domain, or named entities — from the same Events tab.

It is subtractive: everyone sees the full roster unless something is taken out for them, so adding someone to the household does not mean assembling their timeline from nothing.

The filtering happens inside the HKI 7 Cloud component, not in the app, so a restricted device is never handed the ids it is being kept away from and cannot subscribe to them by ignoring a client-side filter.

This hides the timeline, not the entities

As with hidden views and rooms, this hides the timeline. Home Assistant has no per-entity read permission for non-admin accounts, so anyone in the family can still read those entities through Home Assistant directly. Worth knowing before relying on it for anything that actually matters.