I have about 20 z-wave lights/switches in various rooms. In Alexa, I have them grouped into rooms, with one echo device in each room. This way, I can say "Alexa, turn on the lights" and she'll turn on just the lights in the room I'm in.
For the last week or so, this has gotten unreliable. If I'm in a room with 3 smartlights, maybe she'll turn 2 of them on. Then I repeat the command and she finishes the job.
I don't think it's a z-wave issue. Broad commands kicked off by my hubitat apps and Rule Machine are working fine. I also use Homebridge/Siri, and telling Siri the same command "Turn off the kitchen lights" is perfectly reliable and fast.
This makes me think it's either an issue on Amazon's side, or in the Alexa/Hubitat integration. It really only started about a week ago. Any ideas?
There have definitely been some changes to Alexa in the past week. Not exactly related to your issue, I've had to change my commands. In the past, "Alexa, Bathroom on" or "Alexa, Bathroom off" would control the bathroom groups just fine. Now "Alexa, Bathroom off" get the "I don't know how to set Bathroom to that setting". I have to tell her to "turn" on/off or "set" a level.
LOL that could be quite entertaining if you have multiple switches that trigger Hubitat automations! I'm imagining all the lights flashing and the garage doors banging up and down.
I hope Amazon resolves this or we figure out something. I have rooms with a bunch of switches and I really like being able to walk and ask Alexa to turn them all on, but it sucks when it's unreliable.
Oh, that's super interesting. It looks like Amazon is throttling calls from your Hubitat. That means it's receiving too many too fast and discarding them.
The odd thing is, I have no idea what would be triggering those calls. They started 11/26 at 11 PM and seems to do it every night at 11. I have not added any routines to do it.
Oh wow. It just happened to be almost 11pm here, so I decided to fire up the logs page. Lo and behold... I'm now getting the THROTTLING_EXCEPTION too! I have never seen this before! But it started at exactly 11:00:01.401 pm.
It looks like it's being thrown by the Amazon Alexa Skill. Here's the full error:
2019-12-03 11:00:01.383 pm errorError making Call to Alexa message gateway: {"header":{"namespace":"System","name":"Exception","messageId":"30936399-d633-463d-bc95-43fe45c662fe"},"payload":{"code":"THROTTLING_EXCEPTION","description":"Request could not be processed due to throttling."}}
I also see one of them that happened at exactly 10pm tonight.
