Is this normal Zwave Routing?

As usual I have slow response time on my zwave mesh network and lightning fast on my expanding Zigbee mesh network. The last several network repairs keep showing a relatively large number of failures that bother me regardless of them being potentially trivial… so I set out to investigate further.

I noticed something strange on two of the devices that failed the network repair…

Device: Stairs Light
Routing: Stairs Light >>> Game Room Amplifier >>> Hub

Device: Game Room Amplifier
Routing: Game Room Amplifier >>> Game Room Fan >>> Stairs Light >>>> Hub

Let’s say I try to turn my Stairs Light ON from the app, what hops will the message take?

Notice that the intermediate hop (GR Amp) uses two other intermediate hops, one of which is the Stairs Light. Wouldn’t this cause a loop?

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The information that you get from smartthings on zwave routing is not a topology map like most of zwave controllers would give you. That would look like this:

Instead, all it’s giving you is a routing record of how one specific message was transmitted. I don’t know if this was the last message, I’m guessing it’s more probably just a snapshot that was taken at a particular time.

All of which is to say it doesn’t mean that your stair light will hit the gameroom amplifier and then take the same route that the gameroom amplifier took the last time.

The specific route chosen depends on a lot of different variables, including network traffic.

So it’s not a very helpful dataset at this time.

Zigbee is different because Zigbee devices choose a single parent and then try to route through it each time. So their routes tend to be more stable.

I have the software to see the topology map you show above, but one thing that is not clear to me is whether the map I see is specific to the controller I am using or the main controller. In other words, I have to add a Zwave secondary (?) controller to my network in order to get the map to populate. IS the map I am getting the map used by the ST controller, or is it the map used on the secondary controller used by the software? I believe it is the latter so, while interesting, it has limited value when trying to figure out what issues are occurring on the ST zwave mesh network. Am I off?

As always, @JDRoberts thanks for your insightful answers!

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The map should be the one used by the smartthings controller at the time that your secondary controller joined the network. It won’t keep up with new devices added after that, but the map is owned by the primary.

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