Maintain Healthy Devices

polling
device_health

#1

When I first created my z-wave network, many of my devices would periodically be knocked off-line. I could get them back on-line by simply going into the ST app and clicking the refresh tile. I discovered I could replicate this with the Poll action and created this very simple piston to automatically do that for me.

Posting this here in case anyone runs into a similar issue and is looking for a simple fix.


#2

Thanks @dra . I have same problem for official ST devices.

What is this Poll Action? I can only see a refresh action in the dropdown.


#3

I’m curious, if you had lots of devices, like, a LOT of devices ~100, I would think that polling 100 devices every 30 minutes might cause problems (not sure how it would manifest). Would it be better then to break it up into groups that are offset? I feel like I read somewhere that lots of polling was generally not a great thing, or some post about not using pollster etc. Maybe I’m wrong (memory’s the first to go…)


#4

@dra if you disable that piston, do your devices continue to go offline? i know this was a problem with ST earlier, just dont know if it is still a current issue?

my experience with hub v2 is that if the devices support a polling capability declared by their DH, ST will auto poll the device every 10 mins or so.

thanks.


#5

@vikas You should see an option for “Poll” under Commands Available to All Devices in the action portion of the do statement.

@variable I’ve wondered the same thing…part of the reason I posted it here was to see if someone more knowledgeable than me might weigh in on memory usage, etc. I’ve only got about 30 devices on my network, though, and haven’t noticed any issues.


#6

@bangali They do occasionally go off-line when I turn this piston off. Not sure why, as I have turned Device Health off and am fully up-to-date on hub firmware.


#7

ahh, OK. sorry to hear. this is hub v2?


#8

Yep


#9

ok. have you tried decreasing the frequency to say once every hour or every couple of hours and see if that has a negative or positive effect?

promise, not grilling you just trying to learn from you. :slight_smile: am having some recent issues with zwave devices of my own. what i am finding is i introduced a bad zwave device recently which was causing these problems. after removing the device, seems like both of my zwave and zigbee devices are working in a more stable fashion.


#10

@dra Unfortunately I don’t see that option, just the 4 shown in screenshot below. I am on latest webCoRE codebase.


#11

It is likely not showing because one or both of those devices does not have the poll capability


#12

Interesting. I just posted a message here Notification of device going offline (failing health check) asking how to create a piston that will alert me any time a device fails the healthcheck and goes offline. Perhaps these two things could be combined, so that any time a device goes offline your piston would then attempt to bring it back online?

Speaking of which - I noticed that the Alexa SmartApp seems to send a “refresh” command to devices that are offline. A nice perk, if that works.


#13

@bangali If I decrease the frequency, I’ll still occasionally get devices going off-line. I hadn’t considered that I might have one or two bad devices that are causing the issues (though that is totally plausible). I guess this is kind of a no-cost solution, so I haven’t spent further time troubleshooting.

@HDGuy Interesting – I like the idea of a piston that monitors for health status and then proactively polls. I only took a brief look at some of the different options and didn’t see one that looked like it would monitor for a device going off-line. I saw a SmartApp in the ST forums that seemed like it might fulfill that use case but didn’t install it to try.


#14

ok.

while its a good idea, the chances are if the device has already gone offline - refresh command will likely not reach the device.


#15

@bangali The refresh command doesn’t work for a device that has gone off-line for me (I tested it), but the poll command does.


#16

sorry. that was in reference to alexa sending refresh to offline devices :slight_smile:


#17

Ahh, gotcha. Concur!