Well it was a good run but over the past several weeks I have been experiencing lights not turning off / on at scheduled times. Other problems such as lights not turning off after short delays. Irrigation controls failing to turn on, and even worse, failing to turn off!. Needless to say the more critical timed functions have now been disabled. This all reminds me of the days of past, although not as bad, YET!
Reporting this problem to support has yielded finger pointing at “Third party applications”, such as CoRE. It is pretty clear that these failures are not the result of Third party applications but rather a general slowdown of the command executions. The logs document these failures so it anyone would like to contribute by posting their logs maybe we can point the support team here so they take the necessary steps early. I don’t want to return to the old days.
Honestly support needs to stop finger pointing. Last time this happened a lot of good community dev’s were driven away and you’re creating a cycle where community devs are needed for SmartThings to do a good number of things, but the blame is put on them for issues (rather than working with them to correct it if it really was an issue). Also it seems support and the management team aren’t on the same train of thought simply because the staff interacting with the community is rather helpful into looking into these and pinpointing the actual problem where as support is dependent on who the ticket gets to and if they decide to brush it off or not (which negates the purpose of a support team).
3 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
5
All due respect to the support person that pointed the finger, I replied back to them and said it was unproductive and not helpful. That person did write back and apologize for taking that stand and agreed it was not the best approach. With that said, I don’t want to get that person in trouble so I won’t share my tickets. They shouldn’t be needed anyway. The engineers / IT people at SmartThings should be able to see this happening. I suspect more hardware is needed. I just hope they do it before everything goes over the cliff for the third or fourth time.
Timed events is the most basic of any home automation. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles the platform has, if it can’t turn on and off a light at the proper time, then the platform is a failure.
The support team has been provided information on investigating these failures. I apologize for the finger being pointed at CoRE in your instance. Screenshots such as those in the original post are helpful so please provide those to Support when you can. We are taking these failures seriously and would like to reign them in. Thank you for your patience and understanding while we look into them.
8 Likes
tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
8
Thanks, Brad!
We’re really on your side trying to proactively avoid an atmosphere that negatively impacted several high profile developers & Community impressions and were promised would be addressed.
Not meaning to seem impatient; we just appreciate, as always, being able to share what we’re experiencing — technical and otherwise, with the intention of being constructive and helpful, despite being blunt about it.
I can confirm these failures too. I also see the issue where apps (like SmartAlarm) do not recognize mode changes, unless the app is manually “updated”. We hope this gets addressed soon . Creating support ticket now…
I won’t ever remove the app, it’s a GPL license and it implies it needs to stay that way. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind if ST would take CoRE and make it their own stock app. That would be a tremendous benefit to us all, making it run local and all
Just checking in to report the conditions over the past two weeks.
Failures have been steadily increasing. I now have over a dozen timed event failures a day. I have been monitoring the failures using a test app that turn on a switch every 5 minutes and then off 3 minutes later. Back in the beginning the test app would fail every other day and as of today it fails on average 8-9 times over a 24 hour period.
Along with the test app, other more benign failures are mostly seen with turning lights on at sunset as well as turning lights off after motion stops.
The more critical apps for controlling heating and cooling along with Irrigation control have all been disabled.
I am also getting some intermittent failures, a routine did not run for me this am, and my presence sensors went crazy the other night for a spell. Both resolutions took under a minute to resolve, but were annoying.
+1, i.e., same here re: “lights not turning off / on at scheduled times”.
And yet the ST status page reports no troubles of any kind, so apparently the ST team has not put in monitoring for this problem. That makes me imagine they might not know when it’s happening nor where to begin troubleshooting for a cause & remedy or cure.
Reliability is again a fatal flaw for the ST platform. If we can’t even rely on it for scheduled on/off of lights what good it is?
