There are about three threads I wanted to add a thought on the maintenance, as people were “surprised” by it this morning. I’ll start with the positive:
We received an email notifying us about maintenance last week. I read it and was prepared.
I was pleasantly surprised to note when I woke up, that as I was promised, ALL my locally controlled lights using standard devicetypes were working. Yay! The main reason I upgraded has been validated, and it works well.
My cloud based functions (web thermostats, routines to change therms and alarm, etc.) did not update. I expected this, no worries.
So why did this go well for me?
I DON’T tie mission critical functionality to ANYTHING web based. It’s a BAD idea. I will never tie a siren to something that is not locally controlled. My locks one day when I get them will work locally. I strongly feel that ST should figure out a way to make SHM only a local operation, and tie sirens to that local functionality. And then STRONGLY recommend people setup a local method to turn it off, or force it. For the good of the platform.
I knew the maintenance was coming. I knew during the time it was out, that things wouldn’t work, and I knew it would have no effect.
I let my girlfriend know there was maintenance in case anything unplanned happened. She slept through it.
Once I received the back up email, I went to the app, it worked well, I changed the house mode, and all is well.
Now the feedback:
I believe that platform maintenance is the US is best done at about 1pm EST (10am PST) or thereabouts. I think it would be advisable for ST to study a graph of the time based mode changes, and plan their maintenance for the window that has the least number of changes, EXCLUDE any time during typical sleep periods because people are more sensitive during that time. I think the time picked for it today was not the best.
The emails for status were good. However, I do think the email about it taking longer should have been sent prior to 6am. This is picky, but I’m taking the time to write all my thoughts.
The emails for status should be more explicit for our new users telling them exactly what will be down, and maybe recommending what they should do. App down/Graph down, time based events won’t run, local events will, etc.
I wonder if there is some way to notify via the app of system updates. Put in a setting, or publish a SmartApp that will let users know of impending maintenance.
Hope my brain dump of feedback helps here, that’s what I intend.
Overall, I don’t have any complaints with last nights maintenance as well… though, my ceiling fan(s) turned off at some time during the maintenance window, and I do not have anything that turns them on or off automagically yet.
I was expecting this also, But in my case my locally controlled lights would not work… I expected the hue to be the only issue …I need to look at this …
I wonder if modes could be moved to local control and run on the hub. Sunset/sunrise, etc would be local. Mode changes driven by local devices (things start happening) would run local. Mode changes driven by non-standard devicetypes and web based functionality would not run local as I would expect (but maybe someday).
This would help the platform. I wonder if it’s possible…
PS: Total side note/derailment/thought: Please allow custom non-exclusive modes. I still want to have a “seasonal” mode, and sleep during night/day modes.
Everyone will have their own opinions, but I appreciated the timing being in the middle of the night for me. I would much rather sleep through it (with the exception of maintenance complete text message waking me up, which was entirely my fault) than have my system go offline when I’m out of the house.
I also would like to continue the maintenance’s done during the early morning hours. this is when most utilities will perform downtime maintenance’s as it tends to be less impacting for the customer base. Please continue this process as doing maintenance during the day would have negative results especially for those using it for security and alarming.
Ok, so I’m gathering that there is NO good time for maintenance.
And maybe ST did pick the best time based on mode change frequency.
No win situation I guess.
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tgauchat
(ActionTiles.com co-founder Terry @ActionTiles; GitHub: @cosmicpuppy)
9
So… How often are “critical” Cloud based systems taken offline for maintenence (e.g., credit card processing, ATMs, Netflix, cellular and VOIP providers)?
A well-automated Smart Home should be dependent on the product and therefore, even “planned” outages should, eventually, be unacceptable. Unlike my examples above, SmartThings will (cross fingers) eventually minimize the impact of cloud maintenance when we reach maximized local processing (except firmware updates need to be extremely well executed!!!).
In the meantime… Yup… Customers need outage tolerant configurations, but that’s hard to educate the average Consumer.
NB: Advance notice of maintenance outages are an invitation for burglars to target SmartThings armed homes.
my routines were interrupted 4-7am EDT. Logging/ polling and refreshing appears to resume at 7am but I still have no remote access at 11am. George is not getting upset!!! I’ll reboot the hubv1 when I get home. Rebooting remotely had no effect. Presence/Arrival sensors have not updated.
I JUST started moving lights to Smart Lighting but didn’t move to hubv2 so that was funny, expecting it to work locally.
LATER, cold boot did restore normal operation. I’d prefer a remote warm boot. I guess the X10 will stay in service - weak.
Yeah this went poorly for me as well. The timing was bad. I’m sure any maintenance window is bad for someone somewhere, but it seems like they should really try to stay several hours away from sunrise. I’d vote for doing this between midnight-4am EST.
I have some pretty important mode changes that happen around 4-6am to start the day and set lighting levels. But the most important thing is having my alarm auto-disarm, which didn’t happen because of those modes not changing, so I got the annoying alarm when my wife left early.
Since the rules for mode changes are simply based on a static time of day, I guess I had hoped the V2 hub could handle that. I guess not.
Lastly, where are these status notification e-mails everyone is talking about? I got the original maintenance email a few days ago announcing it was going to happen last night, but I didn’t get any e-mails after that. Do I need to sign up somewhere for that?
You can’t do a maintenance at 12am EST, that’s 9pm PST, that’s just not going to happen, 4am EST is about the best time you can do any maintenance and affect the least amount of people, yes some people will still be affected, that doesn’t mean the maintenance went bad necessarily nor does it mean they did it at the wrong time.
The maintenance went great for me and that includes me having to ‘manually’ turn off an LED strip under the bed I use as a night light for when I get home after work at 3am and the GF is in bed asleep. I got home and in between the motion sensor turning the strip on and me getting into bed, they must have flipped the switch to start the maintenance, so I lay there in bed, wondering why the strip didn’t turn off… Oh that’s right, the maintenance they warned us about, no big deal.
If you’re really worried about things going crazy during the maintenance, if you have local control, just pull the Ethernet cable from the hub before the maintenance is due to start.
My issue wasn’t the fact that things weren’t working during the upgrade… But even hours after after the update things still weren’t working… When I was looking at logs… It seems like half of the apps (mostly things that require polling every 5 minutes or so) never started polling and therefore didn’t respond to anything else after…
This was a ‘simple’ fix - I just had to open each one up to make changes - make no changes and then hit done. But when you have many smartapps this could be a pain. Also if your smartapps use state variables to store info about events - you lose that data…
I can handle losing the state data… But having to open each smartapp to bring it back on line was a little much. Also timed routines didnt happen for me - i.e. turning on inside lights to help me wake up. I am hoping that this will work tomorrow.
