For as long as I’ve had a Security view in Home Assistant, it has worked like a spreadsheet: every contact sensor, every lock, every smoke detector, lined up in a grid whether anything was wrong or not. Front door sensor: closed. Office window: closed. Basement leak sensor: dry. Twenty-some rows of green ticks, scrolled past a hundred times a day, mostly on the way to the one row that actually mattered. Home Assistant 2026.9, released September 2nd and now four patch releases in at 2026.9.4, finally gave that dashboard a filter I didn’t know I wanted: it can just stay empty.
A card that only shows up when it has something to say
The new feature is called Active Alerts, and it lives inside the built-in Security dashboard strategy. You pick which entities are allowed to raise an alert, you assign each one a severity — Alert for the things that should interrupt you, like a smoke detector going off or a door unlocking itself at 3 a.m., and Warning for the things that are worth knowing but not panicking about, like a window left open — and then the card does something dashboards rarely do: it disappears. No alerts active, no card. The official 2026.9 release notes put it plainly: it “only shows up when something actually needs your attention.” A companion Favorites section sits next to it for the handful of entities you check manually and don’t want buried in the rest of the dashboard.
It’s a small feature on paper, but it’s the kind of small feature that only happens because someone got annoyed enough to ask for it in public. Digging through the pull request that shipped it — frontend PR #53031, authored by core contributor timmo001 — the idea traces back to a community feature request thread on the Home Assistant forums asking for a proper severity attribute for entities. Reading that thread is a good reminder that a lot of what ships in Home Assistant started as someone’s mildly annoyed forum post, not a product roadmap meeting. One review comment on the PR is worth mentioning too: camera entities were deliberately pulled out of the available alert options before merge, because a live feed thumbnail sitting in an “alert” card next to a smoke-detector state just didn’t make sense. Small detail, but it tells you the feature was actually reviewed rather than rubber-stamped.
Wiring up my own alerts
My setup is the usual local-first pile: Zigbee2MQTT talking to a mix of Aqara and Sonoff sensors, all coordinated by Home Assistant OS running bare-metal on a decade-old HP EliteDesk 800 G4 mini PC that I bought used specifically so I wouldn’t feel bad about it drawing power 24/7. Nothing about that stack changes for this feature — Active Alerts doesn’t care whether your entities come from Zigbee, Z-Wave, Matter, or a cloud integration you’re slightly ashamed of. It just wants entity IDs.
Setup took about ten minutes, and all of it happened in the Security dashboard’s own editor rather than in YAML, which was a pleasant surprise for something this configurable. I went through my binary sensors one at a time:
The Aqara smoke detector in the utility room got Alert severity — the one entity in the house I actually want to interrupt whatever I’m doing. The two door contact sensors (front door, garage side door) also went in as Alert, because an unexpected unlock or open at night is exactly the “stop scrolling and look” situation this feature is built for. Window contact sensors in the living room and office went in as Warning — useful to know about, not worth a phone buzzing at 11 p.m. because I forgot to close one before a September evening got cold. The basement water leak sensor I set to Alert too; water damage is slow-motion but expensive, and I’d rather know in the first ten minutes than the first ten hours.
Everything else — the fifteen-odd sensors that just describe the state of the house rather than flag a problem with it — I left out entirely. That’s really the point of the feature: it’s opt-in by entity, so the card can’t accidentally become the same wall of green ticks it was replacing.
Where it’s genuinely useful — and where it isn’t
After a couple of weeks living with it, the honest verdict is: it’s a good dashboard feature, not a security system. It doesn’t send push notifications on its own — you still need an automation with a notify action for that, same as before 2026.9. What it changes is the default view: when I do open the app because something buzzed, I land on a Security tab that either confirms “yes, that’s the thing, here it is” or is empty, which is its own useful signal that whatever triggered the notification has already cleared. Before this, I’d open the dashboard and have to visually hunt for the red row among twenty green ones. Now there’s nothing to hunt for.
The two-tier severity system is also a real limitation once you start using it seriously. Alert and Warning cover most of a typical house, but I have exactly one situation that doesn’t fit either bucket cleanly — a freezer temperature sensor I’d like flagged as urgent but not visually screaming at me the same way as a smoke alarm. For now it lives in Alert, slightly overstated, because Warning felt too easy to ignore. A third severity tier would fix that, and given how this feature came to exist in the first place, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone’s already asked for it on the forums.
What I keep coming back to, though, is that this is a genuinely local feature solving a genuinely local problem. There’s no cloud service deciding what counts as urgent in my house, no vendor dashboard that changes its layout every six months, no subscription gate between “you have a sensor” and “that sensor can tell you something’s wrong.” It’s a few lines of entity configuration sitting on the same box that’s been quietly running this house since I plugged it in. That’s the whole appeal of doing this locally in the first place — and it’s nice when a release actually delivers on it instead of just promising it in a changelog.
If you’re running a recent Home Assistant instance, the Security dashboard and its Active Alerts card are already there waiting — go to Settings → Dashboards, add (or edit) the Security dashboard, and you’ll find the entity picker and severity dropdown right in the editor. Ten minutes, no YAML required, and one less wall of green ticks to scroll past every day.
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