Most security apps show you alerts: "motion detected," "door opened." What they don't show you is the sequence — which door opened first, how long between that and a motion trigger somewhere else, whether the same pattern happened last Tuesday too.
Home Assistant's Logbook
Once your sensors are behind Home Assistant, every open, close, and motion event becomes a line in one running log, in order, across every device — not just the ones from one brand. A sample from an actual night looks like this: back-door contact opens at 11:02pm, closes 40 seconds later, then the front-door contact opens at 11:16pm. Read on its own, each line is nothing. Read together, it's a story.
How long it's kept
By default, Home Assistant keeps 10 days of this history. That's usually enough to check "did I actually lock up last night," but if you want a longer audit trail, it's a one-line configuration change (purge_keep_days) to extend it — worth doing before you need it, not after.
Why this beats a pile of push notifications
A phone full of "motion detected" notifications from five different apps is noise. One chronological log across every device is something you can actually read back and trust.
Set up your own logbook
The Blueprint shows exactly how sensor data becomes a readable log, and how to extend the retention window.
Get the Blueprint — $47