How to · Home Assistant

You opened the map. Now what is it telling you?

Home Assistant 2026.9 put a network map behind a Show map button on the Matter panel. It is genuinely useful and almost entirely unexplained. This page is what each part of it means, and — more usefully — what you should do about what you are looking at.

Everything below comes from the Home Assistant 2026.9 release notes, published 2026-09-02. Read the release notes. We read that page on 2026-09-19. If Home Assistant changes the map after that date, this page has not caught up yet.

Reading it

Four things the picture encodes.

Three of them are carried by how a line is drawn, which is why they are easy to miss entirely.

Line colour = how the device connects

The release notes put it plainly: "Link color tells you the transport, Thread or Wi-Fi." This is the single most useful thing on the map, because a device's box and its spec sheet are both unreliable on this point.

Line thickness and direction = signal strength

"The thickness and direction reflect the signal strength on each side of the connection." Each side is measured separately, so a link can be strong one way and weak the other. A thin line is where to look when one device is slow and the rest are fine.

Node shape = what job the device does

The map separates "which ones are routers or 'border routers' versus battery-powered end devices." Battery devices sleep between updates. If one of those is the slow one, that is expected behaviour, not a fault.

Names you can actually recognise

"Border routers and access points are named from things you'd actually recognize, like their network host name or Wi-Fi network name, instead of a serial number." So the hub in the corner of the map is identifiable without cross-referencing anything.

Acting on it

What each picture is telling you to do.

The map reports. It does not diagnose. These are the readings worth acting on, and the ones that look alarming but are not.

A device you believed was on Thread is drawn as Wi-Fi. Believe the map, not the box. This changes what you should expect from it on battery life, on range, and when your router restarts — and it means a Thread border router will not help that device.
A device sits alone, with no path back to Home Assistant. That is the shape of the problem people describe as "it paired and then stopped working". The map shows you the break; it does not tell you the cause.
You expected a mesh and see a single hop to one border router. Thread devices relay for each other, but only mains-powered ones do. A map with one router and many leaves is a network with a single point of failure.
A battery device shows a thin or intermittent link. Usually normal. Battery devices wake on a schedule rather than staying awake, so their link is not a continuous one. Compare it against a mains-powered device before concluding anything.
The page tells you your Matter server is too old. The release notes state this is handled deliberately: "If your Matter server is a bit older and doesn't support this yet, the page tells you so instead of just failing, so you know to update rather than assume something's broken."

What it will not tell you

The map is a photograph, not an explanation.

It shows you the state of your network. It does not tell you why the network is in that state. The causes people eventually find — a border router bound to the wrong network interface, client isolation on the Wi-Fi, IPv6 blocked at the router, a multicast setting on a managed switch — are all invisible here.

We did not build this map and we do not maintain it. It is part of Home Assistant. This page explains someone else's feature, from their own release notes, on the date given above.