Sentinel Pro

Overview

Sentinel watches the tracking data of your websites and alerts you as soon as tracking looks broken. To do so it compares every day with the usual value of the same weekday. That is robust, but it lags behind every change: when a website grows, a campaign runs or it is a public holiday, the baseline no longer fits. And when only one channel or one goal breaks, the total often stays within range and nobody notices.

Sentinel Pro makes Sentinel sharper and more specific.

Forecasts instead of averages

Timestral, a time series AI model by Mistral AI, works out on Feinwerk's servers in Germany from the daily visits of up to the last 400 days what each website can expect over the next 31 days, each day with a usual range. Sentinel's checks "Drop in visits" and "Unusual spike (bots, spam)" then compare with this forecast. In our tests with real visit counts, the forecast for the next day was closer to the actual visits on average than the weekday comparison, especially on websites with campaign phases. Days without tracking are left out, so the forecast does not learn an outage as the new normal.

Public holidays per website

Choose the public holidays of each website: Germany with its 16 states, Austria, or Switzerland with its cantons. On a holiday Sentinel does not compare the day with normal days, so a quiet Whit Monday raises no alarm.

Alarms per channel and goal

• Channel drop: an alarm when the visits of one channel (search engines, campaigns, websites, social networks, direct entries, AI assistants) fall far below the usual value of the weekday. It catches campaign tagging or consent breaking for one source only. A drop of the whole website stays an alarm of Sentinel's "Drop in visits", not one per channel.
• Conversion rate drop: an alarm when the conversion rate of a goal or of shop orders falls far below the usual rate of the weekday although conversions still come in. Sentinel itself only notices goals that stop converting completely.

Both checks appear under Administration → Diagnostic → Sentinel next to Sentinel's own checks: on or off per website, with adjustable sensitivity and the same recipients.

A watchdog from outside

Sentinel runs as a scheduled task inside your Matomo. If the cron job or the server stops, it cannot report that itself. So Sentinel Pro tells Feinwerk on every run that Sentinel is working. If these messages stop for three hours, Feinwerk emails the owner of your Feinwerk account, and sends an all-clear as soon as Sentinel runs again.

Forecast reports

Under Visitors → Forecast:

• Visits forecast: a chart of the last and the next 28 days with the usual range, public holidays and unusual days, plus "Expected tomorrow", "Projection for this month" and "Accuracy".
• Today against the forecast: yesterday, today and tomorrow hour by hour next to the expected visits, and whether today is on track.
• The reports Visits and forecast by day, Projection, Forecast by channel and Forecast accuracy, also as dashboard widgets and in email reports.

Both charts also appear under Visitors → Tracking health next to Sentinel's health score.

Privacy and transparency

For the forecasts Sentinel Pro sends only visit counts per day to the Feinwerk forecast service (servers in Germany), without website names, addresses or visitor data. The service computes the forecast in memory and sends it back. It does not store the numbers, keeps no request logs and retains nothing between two requests. You can switch the forecasts off at any time; Sentinel then checks with its own baselines. Sentinel Pro says so in a note under every forecast chart and report, in the setting and once after activation.

The license check and the watchdog contact the Feinwerk marketplace, both with the connector's instance token: the license check asks whether your instance holds a license, the watchdog reports the time of the last Sentinel run.

Requirements

• Matomo 5 or later with PHP 8.1 or later
• Sentinel 0.2.0 or later (free)
• The Feinwerk Marketplace Connector, connected to your Feinwerk account, and a license for Sentinel Pro
• Matomo's cron job (core:archive) or browser-triggered tasks, as for Sentinel

Use cases

• Forecasts that know trends and seasons: Sentinel compares every day with a forecast built from up to 400 days of history instead of just the usual value of the weekday. When your website grows or a campaign runs, the forecast follows the new level within days. The forecasts come from [Timestral](https://github.com/mistralai/timestral), a time series AI model by Mistral AI that Feinwerk runs on its own servers in Germany. Only numbers go to the forecast service, no visitor data.
• Public holidays without false alarms: Choose the public holidays of each website: Germany with all 16 states, Austria, or Switzerland with its cantons. A quiet holiday no longer counts as a drop.
• An alarm when only one channel drops: "Channel drop" reports when search engines, campaigns, websites, social networks, direct entries or AI assistants bring far fewer visits than usual, for example when campaign parameters get lost after a relaunch.
• Conversion rate in view: "Conversion rate drop" reports when a goal or your shop's orders still convert, but far less often than usual on that weekday.
• A watchdog for the watchdog: If Sentinel has not run for three hours, for example because Matomo's cron job stopped, the owner of your Feinwerk account gets an email from Feinwerk.
• Forecast reports for every day: Under Visitors → Forecast: visits and forecast for 28 days each with the usual range, a projection for the week, the month and the next 4 weeks compared with last year, a forecast per channel and its accuracy.
• Today at a glance: "Today against the forecast" shows yesterday, today and tomorrow hour by hour next to the expected visits. A tracking outage stands out at once as hours far below the forecast.
• Sparing with data, robust when the service is down: Only visit counts per day go to the Feinwerk forecast service in Germany, and it stores nothing. If it cannot be reached, Sentinel keeps checking without a break.

Sentinel Pro makes the tracking monitoring of the free Sentinel sharper and more specific. Instead of comparing every day only with the usual value of the same weekday, Sentinel uses a forecast that knows trends and seasons. Public holidays no longer cause false alarms, two new checks report when only one channel or the conversion rate of one goal drops, and a watchdog at Feinwerk speaks up when Sentinel itself stops running. On top of that come forecast reports under Visitors → Forecast.

Step-by-step setup

Installation and activation are covered in Installing plugins. Sentinel Pro needs Matomo 5 or later with PHP 8.1 or later, Sentinel 0.2.0 or later, the connector and a license. Steps 1 to 3 need super user access; for steps 4 and 5 admin access to the website is enough.

1. Install Sentinel

First install and activate the free Sentinel (technical name FeinwerkSentinel) in version 0.2.0 or later, most easily under Administration → Plugins → Feinwerk Plugins. If Sentinel is already installed, check its version there and apply the update if needed. Without Sentinel 0.2.0, Matomo does not activate Sentinel Pro.

Sentinel checks every hour as one of Matomo's scheduled tasks, so it only runs while Matomo's cron job (core:archive) or browser-triggered tasks run. The same applies to everything Sentinel Pro adds.

2. License and installation

Open Administration → Plugins → Feinwerk Plugins. If the connector is not connected yet, click Connect with Feinwerk account. For Sentinel Pro, buy the license via Buy a license or assign a license you already own to this instance with Use an existing license. Then click Install: the connector installs and activates Sentinel Pro.

On activation Sentinel Pro checks the license at once and shows super users a one-time note on which data leaves your Matomo for the forecasts. If you install Sentinel Pro by hand from the ZIP file, it still needs the connected connector: the license check, the forecasts and the watchdog all use its instance token.

Without a valid license Sentinel Pro adds nothing, Sentinel works as before, and the Visitors → Tracking health page shows super users the hint Sentinel Pro license. A license bought later is recognised within an hour.

3. Check the settings

Under Administration → System → General settings → Feinwerk Sentinel Pro (FeinwerkSentinelPro):

• Use forecasts (default: on): Sentinel Pro fetches forecasts for every website from the Feinwerk forecast service. When switched off, the checks use their own baseline and the forecast reports stay empty. Public holidays, the two new checks and the watchdog keep working.
• Address of the forecast service: only change this when Feinwerk support asks you to. Only https addresses on feinwerk.io are accepted.

4. Choose the public holidays of each website

Open Administration → Websites → Manage, click Edit next to the website and choose the region under Public holidays: a German state such as Germany: Bayern, Austria, or a Swiss canton such as Switzerland: Zürich. The default is No holidays. Save the website.

On a holiday of that region the daily checks do not judge the day: Drop in visits, Unusual spike (bots, spam), Actions per visit off, Channel drop and Conversion rate drop. No visits keeps watching on holidays, because hours without any visit are rarely a holiday effect. The Visits forecast chart marks public holidays.

5. Set up the new checks

After activation, Administration → Diagnostic → Sentinel lists two more checks next to Sentinel's own. Both have the severity Warning, can be switched on or off per website and report to the same recipients and webhooks as Sentinel's checks. Quiet periods and the daily report for warnings apply to them as well.

• Channel drop: an alarm when the visits of one channel (search engines, campaigns, websites, social networks, direct entries, AI assistants) fall far below the usual value of the weekday. Settings: Sensitivity (k) (default 3; higher values alarm less often) and Share of the usual value (default 0.5, so an alarm needs fewer than half of the channel's usual visits). Channels with fewer than 20 visits on a usual day are not judged. When the whole website drops, Drop in visits reports it, not every channel separately.
• Conversion rate drop: an alarm when the conversion rate of a goal or of shop orders falls far below the usual rate of the weekday although conversions still come in. Settings: Sensitivity (k) (default 3), Minimum change (default 0.5; the rate must fall by at least half) and Conversions a day at least (default 3; goals with fewer conversions are not judged). When a goal stops converting completely, Sentinel's check Goal no longer converts reports it.

Both checks judge complete days, so their alarm arrives the next day. They need at least three weeks of history, which Sentinel and Sentinel Pro read from your Matomo's raw data on their first run.

6. View the forecasts

The first forecast arrives within a few hours of activation, then a new one every 6 hours, always for the whole website. Everyone with view access to the website sees it in two places:

• Visitors → Forecast: the Visits forecast chart with the visits of the last 28 days, the forecast for the next 28 days, the Usual range (8 of 10 days), public holidays and unusual days, topped by Expected tomorrow, Projection for this month and Accuracy. Below it Today against the forecast and four reports: Visits and forecast by day, Projection (this week, this month, next 4 weeks, compared with last year), Forecast by channel and Forecast accuracy.
• Visitors → Tracking health: Today against the forecast and Visits forecast next to Sentinel's health score. A tracking outage shows here at a glance as hours far below the forecast.

All charts and reports are also available as dashboard widgets, and the reports in email reports and exports.

7. The watchdog

On every hourly run Sentinel Pro tells Feinwerk that Sentinel is working. If no message arrives for three hours, for example because Matomo's cron job stopped or the server went down, Feinwerk emails the owner of the Feinwerk account your Matomo is connected to. As soon as Sentinel runs again, an all-clear follows. There is nothing to set up; the watchdog starts with the first message after activation.

Practical examples

Campaign parameters get lost. After a relaunch the home page redirects and drops the campaign parameters on the way. Campaign visits show up as direct entries, the total number of visits stays the same, and Sentinel's own checks see nothing. The next morning Channel drop reports: "Only 35 campaign visits on 2026-10-14 instead of the usual 420 (92 % fewer)."

The checkout stumbles. After a shop update the order confirmation no longer loads for one payment method. Orders still come in, but less than half as often as usual. Conversion rate drop reports that the conversion rate of shop orders was 0.9 % instead of the usual 2.1 %. Goal no longer converts would only have fired once no order at all came in.

A quiet public holiday. On Corpus Christi a website from Bavaria gets far fewer visitors than on a normal Thursday. With the holiday region Germany: Bayern, Sentinel does not judge the day and there is no false alarm. If tracking fails completely that day, No visits still reports it.

The website grows. Since a campaign, a website gets twice as many visits as two months ago. The usual value of the weekday over the last 8 weeks lags behind, and a drop back to the old level would look normal to it. The forecast follows the new level within days, and Drop in visits compares with the forecast.

The cron job stops. After a server move the cron job for core:archive is missing. Sentinel no longer runs and cannot report that itself. After three hours the owner of the Feinwerk account gets the watchdog's email.

How will the month end? In the middle of the month the Projection report shows the visits so far plus the forecast for the remaining days, with a range and the same period last year. You can send it as a weekly email report.

Good to know

• The model: the forecasts are computed by Timestral, a pretrained time series AI model by Mistral AI, on Feinwerk's servers in Germany. It is not trained on your data, and your numbers do not go to Mistral AI.
• How the forecasts are made: a time series AI model on Feinwerk's servers in Germany computes them from the daily visits of up to the last 400 days, for the next 31 days. A website needs at least 14 days with visits; several months are better, and with a year the forecast also knows the season. Sentinel reads the history once from your Matomo's raw data; if Matomo has deleted old raw data, it starts with the oldest day available. For the forecast per channel, Sentinel Pro uses the visits per channel of up to the last 70 days.
• Days without tracking: days with an obvious tracking outage (below 30 % of the usual value of the weekday) are left out of the forecast, so it does not learn an outage as the new normal. The charts mark these days as unusual days.
• Which checks use the forecast: Drop in visits and Unusual spike (bots, spam) compare with the forecast, and their alarm texts then say "although the forecast expected about …". No visits stays with the usual value of the weekday and hour. While No visits or Drop in visits is open for a website, Sentinel's own baseline decides, so that a forecast made during the outage cannot end the incident with a false all-clear.
• Accuracy: in our tests with real visit counts, the forecast for the next day was on average closer to the actual visits than the weekday comparison, especially on websites with campaign phases. The usual range covered about 8 of 10 days, as intended, so only a few days a month are marked as unusual. No forecast can foresee when a campaign starts or ends. How well it fits your website is shown by the Forecast accuracy report, which leaves public holidays out because the forecast does not know them.
• When the forecast service cannot be reached: if the service does not answer, is slow or returns unusable numbers, no alarm is raised and Matomo is not slowed down. Sentinel Pro tries again after an hour. Meanwhile the checks keep using the stored forecasts for up to 31 days, then Sentinel's own baselines. The System Check shows the outage as information.
• Forecast reports: they always show the current state of the whole website, whatever period is selected, and segments are not applied. The hourly values in Today against the forecast are the daily forecast spread over the hours like on this weekday in the last 8 weeks. When there is no forecast yet, the report says why, and super users get a link to the right setting.
• License: Sentinel Pro confirms a valid license once a day with the Feinwerk marketplace. If the marketplace cannot be reached for a while, the last confirmed license stays valid for up to 30 days. When the license ends, Sentinel Pro adds nothing more, Sentinel works as before, and Sentinel closes open incidents of the two Pro checks without a message.
• Watchdog: it emails once per outage and once for the all-clear, only to the owner of the Feinwerk account. No recipient lists leave your Matomo for this. Test and staging instances get no watchdog email.
• Network: your Matomo server needs outgoing HTTPS connections to plugins.feinwerk.io (license, watchdog) and fw-scan.feinwerk.io (forecasts). It does not have to be reachable from outside.
• Permissions: the settings under General settings are for super users. The public holidays and checks of a website can be changed by its administrators. Everyone with view access to a website sees the charts and reports.
• Troubleshooting: under Administration → Diagnostic → System Check the entry Sentinel Pro shows the license, whether the connector is connected and the state of the forecasts, e.g. "Last forecast: … (websites with a forecast: 3 of 4)". If a report says "There is no forecast for this website yet", the website has fewer than 14 days with visits or the first forecast is still to come. More in Troubleshooting.

Privacy and transparency

For the forecasts Sentinel Pro sends only visit counts per day to the Feinwerk forecast service (servers in Germany), without website names, addresses or visitor data. The service computes the forecast in memory and sends it back. It does not store the numbers, keeps no request logs and retains nothing between two requests. You can switch the forecasts off at any time; Sentinel then checks with its own baselines.

In detail:

• What goes to the forecast service: per website the visits per day of up to the last 400 days, and the visits per day per channel (direct entries, search engines, websites, campaigns, social networks, AI assistants) of up to the last 70 days. Nothing else: no website names or addresses, no time zone, no identifier of the website, no visitor data. So that only licensed instances get forecasts, the request identifies itself with the connector's instance token, which the service checks with the Feinwerk marketplace.
• What the forecast service keeps: nothing from the requests. For abuse protection it counts requests per instance and per IP address in memory only; on disk it keeps just the total number of requests per day, nothing per instance.
• License check and watchdog: both contact the Feinwerk marketplace with the connector's instance token. The license check asks whether your instance holds a license for Sentinel Pro, the watchdog reports the time of the last Sentinel run.
• In your Matomo: Sentinel Pro stores the forecasts (45 days) and the visits per channel and day (70 days) in your Matomo database, with no data about individual visitors.
• Notes in Matomo: Sentinel Pro shows a privacy note under every forecast chart and report, in the Use forecasts setting and once after activation.

Technical reference

Property	Value
Technical name	FeinwerkSentinelPro
Current version	0.2.1
Matomo	≥ 5.0.0, < 7.0.0-b1
PHP	≥ 8.1.0
License	paid
Database changes	none in the current version

FAQ

Do I need Sentinel?

Yes. Sentinel Pro is an add-on for the free Sentinel and needs Sentinel 0.2.0 or later, plus the Feinwerk Marketplace Connector and a valid license. Without a license Sentinel Pro adds nothing, and Sentinel works as before.

Which data goes to Feinwerk?

For the forecasts Sentinel Pro sends only visit counts per day to the Feinwerk forecast service (servers in Germany), without website names, addresses or visitor data. The service computes the forecast in memory and sends it back. It does not store the numbers, keeps no request logs and retains nothing between two requests. You can switch the forecasts off at any time; Sentinel then checks with its own baselines. In addition, the license check and the watchdog contact the Feinwerk marketplace (plugins.feinwerk.io), both with the connector's instance token: the license check asks whether your instance holds a license, the watchdog reports the time of the last Sentinel run.

What happens when the forecast service cannot be reached?

Nothing you need to deal with: no alarm is raised and Matomo is not slowed down. The checks keep using the stored forecasts for up to 31 days, then Sentinel's own baselines. Matomo's System Check shows the outage as information.

Which model computes the forecasts?

Timestral, a pretrained time series AI model by Mistral AI. It is not trained on your data: it reads the daily visits of your website as history and returns a forecast with a usual range for every day. Feinwerk runs the model on its own servers in Germany; your numbers do not go to Mistral AI.

How accurate are the forecasts?

In our tests with real visit counts, the forecast for the next day was closer to the actual visits on average than the usual weekday comparison, especially on websites with campaign phases. The usual range covered about 8 of 10 days, as intended. How well the forecast fits your website is shown by the report "Forecast accuracy".

When do forecasts start?

As soon as a website has at least 14 days with visits. Several months are better, and with a year the forecast also knows the season. Sentinel reads up to 400 days of history from your Matomo's raw data. The first forecast arrives within a few hours of activation, then a new one every 6 hours.

Which public holidays does Sentinel Pro know?

Those of Germany with its 16 states, of Austria and of Switzerland with its cantons. On a holiday of the chosen region the daily checks do not judge the day. "No visits" keeps watching on holidays too.

Who gets the alarms?

The two new checks report to the same recipients as Sentinel: by email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or webhook, with the same quiet periods. The watchdog's email goes to the owner of the Feinwerk account your Matomo is connected to.

Do the forecast reports follow segments and periods?

No. They always show the current state of the whole website, whatever period or segment is selected. As dashboard widgets and in email reports they work like any other report.

Can I switch the forecasts off?

Yes, under Administration → System → General settings → FeinwerkSentinelPro with "Use forecasts". Public holidays, the two new checks and the watchdog keep working; only the forecast reports stay empty.