Maintenance Handling

Anyone else having issues with the Smart Home Monitor after the update? No matter in which mode I am or how many times I disarm it, I still get intruder alerts.

Thatā€™s prime development time for me, and Iā€™m on the east coast!

Seriously, though, unless/until the platform gets to a state where they donā€™t need downtime for updates, this is a damned if you do, damned if you donā€™t kind of thing. 4am EST/1am PST is probably as good as youā€™re going to get.

The length of this one just made it too long to fit in anyoneā€™s window of complete comfort.

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This :arrow_up:.

When was the last time you couldnā€™t login to Amazon at any minute of any day and buy something with one click (including SmartThings, ironically, if it was in stockā€¦). We live in a 24x7x365.25 world. So should our Smart Homes.

Ultimately no matter what you do, no matter how much of a 24/7 company you are, no matter how many things you put in placeā€¦ at some point youā€™re going to need downtime of sorts.

There is always downtime, sometimes you just donā€™t notice it. Takes a lot of engineering. Iā€™m not sure ST is ready for that, but it sure would be nice.

That being said, more local control = less consequences, Iā€™d take that too. In the end, still happy with my experience.

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Technically, yesā€¦ But waitā€¦Google has achieved 99.798% uptime with ZERO scheduled downtime for maintenance,ā€¦ So, no ā€” Downtime for maintenance is not inevitable.

https://support.google.com/work/answer/6056635?hl=en

Iā€™m not sure what statistic is reasonable to expect SmartThings to reach. But several hours every other month is definitely too much.

It should be short and rare enough that we shouldnā€™t care when it is scheduled. ie., this Topic would be irrelevant.

Thatā€™s how most of the security companies do it, whether theyā€™re the inexpensive ones like alarm.com or the expensive ones.

If youā€™re selling an expectation of constant service, that can be met with rollover Server banks in all but the most rare cases.

Your utility company does lots of maintenance all the time, but they donā€™t take your power down to do it.

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And yetā€¦ theyā€™ve had downtimeā€¦planned or not, minuscule or not, theyā€™ve had downtime and thatā€™s a company that has a multi billion dollar budgetā€¦ and they still get downtime.

It also entirely depends on the nature of the business and what services they provide, just because both Smarthings and Google are expected to be 24/7 companies, thatā€™s where the similarities end, Smartthings and Google provide different 24/7 services.

Hereā€™s the thing, weā€™re a 24/7 company, we strive for zero downtime and but itā€™s impossible to achieve ZERO downtime and in our sales contracts we actually have a written agreement that says we are allowed 4 hours of downtime for scheduled maintenances every month. For the most part we donā€™t need it however, there are isolated scenarios where we do and we need the clause to prevent us from being sued. I will place money that Google has a similar clause in their contracts

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To be fair, even massive operations like Google are down sometimes, and maintenance doesnā€™t always go as planned.

http://www.google.com/appsstatus#hl=en&v=status&ts=1444805999000

My bank frequently has a banner when logging in of upcoming maintenance and downtime.

Ideal? No. But I canā€™t say our services that we host at work are up 100% of the time either, and Iā€™m sure many of us have lived through some harrowing upgrades.

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I never received the follow-up notices that were mentioned here, only the email last week. It doesnā€™t matter though, as I had zero issues during the maintenance window or since.

Have you subscribed to status alerts? http://status.smartthings.com

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I thought I had, but upon checking just now, it is offering me the option to subscribe. Guess I got distracted at the time. Thanks for the reminder!

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I agree that context is everything. I think SmartThings needs to aim hit the level of a Utility, though local processing will buy them leeway.

In other words, most people in the USA would not tolerate 4 hours (or even 1 hour) a month outage of their electricity, cell phone, or Internet. I donā€™t know what the statistical outage rates are for those, especially distinguishing planned from unplanned.

Meanwhile if Googleā€™s infrastructure helps them (Nest) create a 99.8% uptime service, this will be attractive to people keeping track or anyone who just happens to be impacted too often by inconveniently scheduled or unscheduled outages of a competitor.

Oh absolutely, they SHOULD aim for zero down time! Heck I hope ST sets such a precedent for all other HA companies that the government starts to consider it a utility but that would be a ways off.

Ironically, I donā€™t know about you but where Iā€™m at, we frequently have power outages at the beginning of the year, especially when there is thunder and lightning, and yes, for hours at a time on occasion. Hell, they even love to over-volt on occasion and blow up my devicesā€¦

At the moment I still see Nest and Homekit as cute little attempts at home automation but are highly restrictive in what they can do, heck Iā€™d even go back to Wink before I considered those two options and we all know how I feel about the hatefulness that is the Wink Hubā€¦

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October 13, 2015 2:23PM. Seriously. It happened. =)

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Personally, Iā€™d just like it to be as reliable as a dishwasher. :sunglasses:

For $300 (the price of a starter kit), it doesnā€™t have to be perfect. It will fail or work imperfectly every once in awhile. But those times should be rare enough that I donā€™t remember exactly when the last one happened, and certainly no more often than 2 or 3 times a year. :bar_chart:

Different People May Have Different Expectations

On the other hand, I personally donā€™t use SmartThings as a security system. (I have a completely separate setup for that.) My feeling is that if something monitors potentially life and death emergencies, it needs to be as reliable as a smoke detector no matter what it costs, which means 5 years of near perfect uninterrupted operation with a very small amount of allowable false positives and no missed alerts. :rotating_light::fire_engine::ambulance:

(Thatā€™s why Iā€™m ok with security systems that charge a monthly fee. And why Iā€™m ok with them limiting coverage to a few specific device models and limiting custom code to a few IFTTT type rules. I know Iā€™m asking a lot more of them than I do of my dishwasher, and I know itā€™s challenging to meet those reliability targets.)

If I had bought SmartThings to use as a security monitor, I would have a much higher level of expectation for reliability.

But regardless of which category SmartThings belongs in, it should have a predictable level of reliability.

Right now a bunch of stuff that worked last week isnā€™t working for me. Thatā€™s on two sides of the platform update, but I have no idea if thatā€™s related. Just weirdness cropping up. Some of it comes and goes. For me, thatā€™s the hardest part of knowing how to plan. Announcements of planned outages are helpful, but I never have any idea of how big the " ripple effect" will be after it comes back. :scream:

The following is from the afternoon after the maintenance was complete.

The switch was neither On nor Off. Results were, as they say, ā€œunpredictable.ā€ :fearful:

( and, no, this was not just a mobile app refresh issue. The reason I was looking at the screen in the mobile app to begin with was because the switch was not working properly. )

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[quote=ā€œJDRoberts, post:37, topic:26603, full:trueā€]

The switch was neither On nor Off. Results were, as they say, ā€œunpredictable.ā€ :fearful:
[/quote]

Even the plug socket looks shocked/confused!

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My icons disappeared from SmartApps. Not sure how because they didnā€™t change the app. But wellā€¦

Update: This issue has been reproduced by ST team and affects iOS users and engineering team has been notified.

This is a bit odd. My time-based auto-routines still did not run this morning. Itā€™s almost like the maintenance killed the scheduler for those as well. I guess Iā€™ll try and just click through them to see if that jumpstarts them. Regardless of the maintenance window, this is not the kind of thing that should persist after an update.

Edit: I looked at the details in graph.api, and things are even stranger. It claims the routine ran at 5:00am like it was supposed to, but it most certainly did not. The mode never changed, and no entry was created in the messages screen.

Reboot your hub. Mine worked this morning.

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