Time based events failing?

Did you change any by a small offset?

Here’s my sunset and goodnight for tomorrow. Let’s see what happens…

Sunset:

Goodnight

Nope. Some I didn’t change at all. They just worked starting with my sunrise. Random luck?

Local processing vs not? I know @smart has mostly Hues, not local.

thanks that fixed it I think… but a pain with it hanging or crashing every 30 secs. they dimmed at 10 pm and turned off at midnight

I happened to be at the CEDIA 2015 Expo, which this year was in my city - The big D. I saw several competitors to SmartThings who had their booths. All of them are planning for an installer model too. Oomi and Fibaro were the two main companies who I spent time talking to. Their strategy seems to be where they will encourage DIY and promise that their systems will be simple enough to support DIY, but at the same time they also are open to having an installer model, with a dedicated support structure etc. With Samsung backing ST, and considering that almost all the future Samsung appliances will be able to talk with ST (Hub V2 supports SHP - Smart Home Protocol that is used by Samsung appliances) - I think ST will always have an upper hand. However, I feel ST should open up to an installer model as well…with the number of devices that are supported on ST platform and considering that lot more devices are going to be added, the technicalities of adding, maintaining and even choosing the right device may become a deterrent for someone to choose ST. There is a vast majority who dont want to spend time researching sensors, systems and devices - They just want a certain use case to execute and I think , installers can help them achieve that from choosing devices to installing and configuration + maintenance and support (with dedicated support from ST to some extent).

After typing all this I realized that this may not be the right place to post this…but I am posting anyways :smile: . Just to keep my post in line with the topic…My scheduled events failed 3 times today and this time it was time based events . I have 2 events to execute at the same time and only one executed. Haven’t heard back anything from support either.:neutral_face:

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As a vp.of develooment at our company i believe you.need to fire your management staff. With cloud based apps other companies would never get away with his. You need to write routunes to backup and restore your databases especially the scheduler and scheduled tasks before you do maintenance and reboot the servers. You obviously dumped the whole database of scheduled tasks during the last maintenance schedule and then to make things worse never even notified or told your customers. I know it is only a 99 hub and not mission critical but if we wrote s/w like this and treated customers like his we’d be out of business.

Not to be more critical but just a suggestion as for the android app crash/hang I’d also send out a special version of the app or have some way to turn in debugging and send the log back to your developers… it should be pretty easy to determine either where it is hanging and it going into a runaway process and consuming 40-50% of the cpu with a debug log.

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Does SmartThings post in these forums?

Is the problem fixed?

If it is not fixed what is the solution to make sure the lights turn on and off as scheduled?

go into each smart app that has a time or based on sunrise sunset make a change save it… go back in and change back and save it.

Funny how I was spared the initial agony, but now that many are reporting an improvement, my system is going totally down the tubes. Last night and this morning, Good Night and Good Morning routines failed to trigger, and as a result, all sorts of things broke. My initial report to support was that modes were being ignored. Now they are failing to even execute! I sent another detailed update to support, but of course, have not even heard back from my initial report (other than the lame canned auto-reply that everyone receives).

While I wait to hear back (ever the optimist :smile:), I decided to try the “universal fix” - pull the power plug on the hub, wait for it to be reported offline, then bring it back online. I’m also going into every routine, device handler, and smartapp with a scheduler and moving the time forward and then back again…doing a Save each time. Don’t know what else to try; fingers crossed.

FWIW, I have not had to “adjust” the time, just open and “done” the routines that didn’t fire. Maybe that will save some time for some folks. I found one more that wasn’t working this morning, so I think the rule is that every time based smartapp needs to be gone through. None of my time based routines have failed after being reset.

ST should review the need to reset these apps. Can they reset all “dead” schedules automatedly? While the scheduler failing is bad enough, if it’s rare, or recovers quick it’s ok. It’s the lasting effect of users having to comb through their smartapps that is problematic.

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My timed events haven’t been reliable for about 48 hours. I have some lights triggered at sunset to turn on. That worked. The event to turn them off at midnight, lower my thermostat, and turn off other inside lights did not. My “good morning” routines to adjust the thermostat also didn’t work.

After changing the time on one to test, and saving it, I can confirm it is now working. I’m curious if a fix will be pushed to fix this for users that don’t look at the community forums and such?

All scheduling is stored on SmartThings’ servers. Rather than responding to multiple customers when they complain, they could (and should!) take the proactive approach by wring a script to do it automatically for their user base. Yes, it will take time. But they would turn a bad situation into a good one, and people would be more likely to cut them some slack the next time something went wrong.

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Multiple failures in the last 15 hours, including good morning not running. :scream:

My housemate just went ballistic. He wants to go buy “that Harmony zigbee thing” (Harmony Hub Extender) and use that until there are enough HomeKit pieces available to meet our needs.

Most of our automations are very simple and timebased. Ironically the one piece we couldn’t replace yet is Echo voice control of Harmony.

(To be fair to SmartThings, there’s a lot that it can do that harmony extender cannot. The harmony is really just adding on/off capabilities for Z wave and Zigbee devices to their existing button remote paradigm. You can put things on timers, and you can trigger activities from sensors, but you can’t turn on a zigbee switch and have a zwave fan go on. And you can’t dim anything except Hue bulbs. And there’s no way to do any of the kind of “motion detector turns the light on unless the light is already on and somebody is home” kind of logic. It’s just that that’s not what my housemate uses.)

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I took a small afternoon nap and woke up to see a few lights on for no apparent reason. Weird!

Yes, we are seeing random events here as well.

OK… firstly, super cute dogs! Is one a Beagle? Private Message me with the details and pictures? :dog:

Next….
Who are you addressing your comment to (ie., “you need to fire your management staff…”)? Who is “you”?

You’ve not been on the Community forum very long (September, correct?). What you might not know is that SmartThings representatives from all levels of the company keep an eye on this forum, including the CEO (Alex Hawkinson) and CTO (Jeff Hagins), and various levels also attend the open bi-weekly “Developer’s conference calls”. Alex and Jeff, themselves, have been on a couple calls.

Now I can’t put exact words in their mouths, but I believe I am not inaccurate if I summarize the impression I get from them is this (based on their public statements in posts, tweets, and aforementioned conference calls, etc.):

  1. They are sorry about the problems you are experiencing and would love if you contacted support@SmartThings.com, and even tweet / email them personally, so they can “make this right”. NB: Check out the reviews of Hub V2 on Amazon.com; every single negative comment is responded to by a representative of SmartThings saying the above. Support is often overwhelmed, but always friendly, professional, and praised. Support is usually aware of the most effective workarounds for common problems (eg, open each SmartApp Preferences and press Done), but sometimes defers to saying it will be fixed “soon” in unspecified future release, with no personal follow-up, Case/Ticket is then immediately inaccurately marked “Resolved” (per Support Team management public and private response). Manual follow-up process was promised by the VP of Operations Tyler1.

  2. They admit that they purposefully release with known issues, and that there are a lot of known issues, and that fixes are prioritized based on various impact factors. This drives a rapid release cycle strategy going forward (per Hagins). When an issue like this (scheduling) has been outstanding for a long time, it either means that it is: (a) very very hard for them to solve especially in such a rapidly growing company with a rapidly evolving product and growing workforce, and/or (b) isn’t considered high enough priority to solve relative to the many, many other issues and features in the queue (simple example of this is the lack of Labels on Thing Tiles in App V1, except via shaking; it was never resolved, in favor of deferring it for 3 years until redesign and release of Things List view in App V2).

Direct PM, email and/or Tweet to Alex and/or Jeff and see if you end up with the responses I describe above. I’m not making any judgement as to whether or not these are “valid” responses; Instead, I’m saying that SmartThings is and continues to be extremely consistent in their handling of all these issues.

They are an extremely “customer focused” company and management team, that appears to fail at solving what appear to be relatively “solvable” long-term ongoing issues.

We are either underestimating the complexity of the Platform or overestimating the ability – or motivation – for SmartThings to fix things. Based on #1., everyone, including the highest levels of management, are highly and sincerely motivated for the platform to be stable and customer friendly. I don’t want to imply they are not. So … draw your own conclusions?

Old Buddhist saying: “your life is your philosophy.” Meaning you invest your time and resources into the things that are important to you.

If stability and a customer-friendly experience were their top priority, that’s what they would be delivering.

No judgement: different companies have different priorities, and there’s a lot of room in the market for that.

I don’t tend to get heavily emotionally invested in these kind of situations. I look at the product as delivered and I determine whether it’s of value to me in terms of the amount of time and money it takes.

But I evaluate the company’s philosophy on the basis of the delivered product/service, not the other way around.

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I have been patient, trust me, but I am at my wits end after investing in the frustrating V2 hub migration, re-writing several SmartApps to handle all sorts of backend issues that prevent my home security automation activities to be trustworthy. I invested in the local processing capabilities of the V2 hub, only to find out that some lightbulbs can be processed locally, not any of my general Z-Wave devices.

I totally understand how a company Help Desk and their IT Support Personnel can be overwhelmed when the software, firmware and backend servers that are in production are not stable, losing scheduled jobs, not honoring documented functions in code that has been performing flawlessly for many months, etc… When the ST support switchboard lights up, and everyone in the department runs for cover or is burned out and leaves the company to take a less stressful job. I have several emails in queue with documented ticket numbers and I have never heard back, chats that are started, only to have ST close down the chat system because it is over loaded, etc.

I have a significant time and money investment in my home automation, and SmartThings was supposed to be the core. But as time goes on, I am leaning toward grabing the next bus from a company that has sufficient support personnel to meet commonly practiced expectations.

I know I am not alone in this regard, and hopefully ST will get their act together to help the loyal customers who have been with them for some time and now can tell that all they are interested in is grabbing new customers and fancy marketing advertisements on Facebook.

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I hear you. But SmartThings is now a “big corporation” and Marketing is given a mission that is isolated from the other silos in the company (design, engineering, operations, support, development platform, etc.).

Deciding whether or not Marketing is being pressured by Samsung (or just by the CEO?) to show gross revenue or market-share growth is an exercise I’ll leave up to the reader.

@tgauchat : I’m not sure I would classify SmartThings as a “Big Corporation” at this point in their lifecycle. From what I can see, Samsung has only loosely integrated a small part of SmartThings marketing and product information website into the Samsung Corporate website and is currently allowing SmartThings to operate as a totally independent profit division.

For example, when I check the Samsung Corporate website for product support, they do not list “Home Automation” as a choice in the drop down menu. When I asked, they said that SmartThings are not supported by Samsung, but I would need to reach out to their support center, which has been MIA for most of many emails and chats.

I will concede that SmartThings will become a part of a “Big Corporation” when they have the same quality 7x24 support level and quality product release that Samsung, Apple, IBM, Dell, Oracle, etc demonstrate. For now, it is early in the Samsung-SmartThings integration and really nothing has changed since the merger other than SmartThings is reporting income to Samsung Corp.

Forbes Article: Samsung Acquires SmartThings, A Fast-Growing Home Automation Startup - 8/2014

According to the two companies, SmartThings will operate as an independent company and will be moving from its home base of Washington D.C. over to Samsung’s Open Innovation Center in Palo Alto. The Open Innovation Center acts as an investing arm and startup accelerator for U.S. companies that Samsung is interested in.

“While the company has been acquired by Samsung, being in the Open Innovation Center, the company will be kept at arms length away from Samsung,” said Samsung executive vice president David Eun in a phone call. ”We want to people to understand how important it is that they will stay independent. SmartThings will continue to work with its developer community and business partners. In the meantime, we’ll be exploring ways to partner with them.”

Just what exactly those partnerships between SmartThings and Samsung will look like has yet to be determined. But it’s not hard to imagine how important it will be for Samsung to figure out how to better place its smartphones and electronics empire at the center of people’s lives. Samsung already has a number of connected appliances. Now, Samsung could sync them up with the thousands of gadgets coming out almost every day. SmartThings’ sole piece of hardware–its hub that talks to all of the smart gadgets in one central place–could also come pre-installed in any one of Samsung’s electronics, such as its TV.

I’m not the only one on this community forum to point out the current low level of response when we email or chat for support, especially when an operational issue on the backend has caused significant issues on our home automation devices. This was not how it used to be, and I am hoping that SmartThings can pull out of this nose drive before other Home Automation players jump in.

Having a significant time and financial investment in SmartThings, I’m hoping for a turn around in resources dedicated to customer support and backend stability.

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