Hub Status -- HUB_DISCONNECTED v OFFLINE

Devices & Integrations
1

I have a v2 Hub and recently added about 100 Zwave devices (mostly Fibaro light switches – Dimmer 2 and Single Switch 2). I am using the Classic App, and have defined approximately 10 Rooms (each with roughly 10 devices).

Although my devices appear to be “substantially” working, about 5 of them are getting “HUB_DISCONNECTED” messages and occasionally an OFFLINE message in the IDE.

The symptoms of both messages appears to be the same. In the Room view on the Classic app, the “problem” Fibaro device shows as “Unavailable” (with no toggle On/Off button). Yet, when I click on the name of the device, I get a more detailed screen, which includes an icon to toggle the device On or Off.

What is surprising is that the functionality on this more detailed screen WORKS FINE. It turns the device On and Off, with the state change reflected on the screen (and the lights actually turn On or Off).

Yet, the IDE still shows the HUB_DISCONNECTED message, even though everything (except the initial Room view screen) works fine.

I also have one Fibaro switch which the IDE showed as “OFFLINE”. It exhibited precisely the same behavior, except that, once I remotely turned it On and Off, the IDE quickly changed to “ONLINE.”

I’m mostly curious what the differences (if any) are between these 2 IDE messages (HUB_DISCONNECTED and OFFLINE), and whether they are going to change over time. They seem to be present with respect to the same 5-6 devices (out of about 100 devices). There is nothing obviously distinct about these devices. Some are closer to the Hub, most are Fibaro Single Switch 2 devices, though 1 is a Dimmer 2 device.

I guess I could remove them from the Hub, and then re-discover them.
But, I’m wondering whether anyone has experienced anything similar, or has any other troubleshooting suggestions.

I’m hoping this will not be a recurring problem affecting different devices over time.
Appreciate any thoughts.

2

It’s been generally considered (though may not always be true…), that health status messages are not accurate and can, in most situations, be ignored.

Many customers find that SmartThings works best with “Health Check” disabled.

I presume HUB_DISCONNECTED vs OFFLINE are possibly unrelated to each other, or they are different results from Health Check.

The problem: There is no public documentation on the Health Check feature. So we customers and external developers have been left in the dark.

3

Have seen this with a couple of devices too…
I rebooted my v2 hub via the IDE, and all went back to normal… Haven’t had the problem since the reboot… It could be a “device health” issue…

4

I’ve typically only seen this with zigbee devices, but as others have said, this status seems useless. When ever I get it, it’s because the hub rebooted, but the devices works perfectly fine, and it eventually goes away.

This, of me at least, does mean I have a device no longer controllable (typically from the mobile apps, smartapps like Alexa seem to still work ok). Power cycling the switch, or using the airgap switch, gets it back online again, or even after something like you did wakes it up.

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5

Interesting. When I disable “Health Check” (in the Classic App), the functionality of the devices in the Classic app returns to normal (ie, no longer says “Unavailable” and the toggle on/off icon returns).

But, in the IDE, devices still showed a Status (Active, Inactive, Online, Offline, HUB_DISCONNECTED, etc), and now about a dozen devices showed HUB_DISCONNECTED. So I rebooted the Hub from the IDE, and that seemed to solve the problem. Initially, many devices showed HUB_DISCONNECTED. But, after a few minutes, all devices showed ONLINE (apart from a few devices that were correctly identified as OFFLINE, since they were not powered up).

Thanks for all the feedback. I guess I will leave Health Check disabled in the Classic app, and either reboot the Hub from the IDE if the problem reoccurs, or just ignore it.

Might be nice if someone from SmartThings Staff could chime in and provide some more details (even though this is not a major problem).

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6

… Oh it is a pretty major problem.

Thousands of customers have their devices marked “offline” (etc.) frequently and have no idea why or what to do about it. No decent App should require customers to contact Support except in rare circumstances. So if devices are “dropping off”, the App should explain what might be wrong and how to fix it; and the Platform should improve in stability to avoid the problem altogether.

This has been an issue ever since “Health Check” was added to the Platform - added, may I repeat, with no public documentation.

2 Likes
7

So, I had this problem all last month and the only way to resolve it was to reboot the hub over and over again until all my devices started reporting correctly. I’m now going on about 3 weeks without issues. Samsung had some sort of server side issue too during my first 2 attempts of rebooting the hub, so that could be why my HUB_DISCONNECTED issues migrated between devices after each reboot. The 3rd time i reset, Samsung had already reportedly resolve the server issues.