Looking at my devices status in IDE. I see ACTIVE, INACTIVE, OFFLINE, ONLINE, REMOVED. What are they?
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I’ll take a stab at this based on my experience, and ST staffers and community members can correct me, or add, as needed.
These are devices your ST hub is communicating with in some way, shape, or form. ONLINE is something new ST introduced a few firmware versions back. In my experience (and for the devices I use), my Zigbee devices that are ONLINE and have Last Activity over an hour old have something wrong with them, otherwise all is good.
For example, I had a few Iris motion sensors that were ONLINE but had Last Activity that was 4 hours old. I discovered that both battery and temperature readings were no longer updating, even after a manual refresh or from ST’s polling/ping period (you’ll see a ping in your device’s event log when selecting ALL). After I reset those devices (did not remove), they all started working again. More than likely the devices lost their configuration settings, or got corrupted at some point (and I have no idea why)
With regards to Zwave devices, the same may or may not be true with Last Activity. “Sleepy” devices that are battery powered, or even AC powered devices that are configured for long polling periods, may not have any Last Activity for many hours, or even a day or 2. For me, I pay attention to ACTIVE/ONLINE Zwave switches with Last Activity over a day old. If I see those I will make sure ST can still control them, and if so I don’t worry about them, otherwise I’ll perform a Repair via the phone app.
OFFLINE is also something new ST introduced, so my experience is a little limited. For Zigbee devices, this means your device has dropped off your Zigbee mesh and needs to rejoin. Sometimes the rejoin can happen all by itself, or it my be manually rejoined by resetting the device. Devices can go offline for many reasons. In my experience, it’s been related to range/interference issues - or the repeater it was previously routing through has gone away and it’s trying to rejoin through another repeater or even the ST hub. If the repeater is gone, the device should rejoin fairly quick, say 15 to 30 minutes.
If you see this a lot with Zigbee devices, I would recommend investigating range/interference issues; or just get a smart plug (like ST’s or Iris’s) and extend and develop a strong mesh for your devices (the same applies to Zwave devices but with Zwave repeating devices).
I can’t quite explain INACTIVE well enough (phone-an-ST-friend comes to mind here). I do know that I have INACTIVE devices, but they still work - like my Aeon Minimotes. These are “sleepy” devices and don’t respond to ST’s polling commands, so eventually ST marks them as INACTIVE when they really aren’t. The same applies to some of my virtual devices. I suspect that ST’s new method of using ONLINE/OFFLINE may some day take over for ACTIVE/INACTIVE.
I’ve seen this happen when someone in my family has accidentally excluded a device via one of my Aeon Minimotes, and I’ve seen this happen when a general exclude process removes a device I wasn’t intending to remove. If you perform a general exclude process, make sure nobody in your home decides to use a zwave device at the same time. You may discover that the device they used got removed instead of the device you were working with. You’ll have to readd any device that has REMOVED as a status.
Hopefully that helped, and I see @slagle snuck in a reply while I was typing. Hopefully more folks can chime and add more info.
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Thanks for the replies guys. @slagle as for the link posted above. It talked about ONLINE, OFFLINE AND Verifying and very vague. Thanks @johnconstantelo, look like I have too many offline devices and doesn’t seem like fun to do. Now I am afraid to bring my hub off power again. Power outage on the 23rd and my zigbee is a mess. I was hoping to do some healing but afraid to touch it until after the holiday.
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