How do you go about troubleshooting device communication issues?
I added a switch a month ago and tested it a few times and all was fine. It is in an external garage but not more than 35 feet away from the hub. I have just added the device to an app to schedule it on/off at sunrise and sunset and it did not work.
I look in logs and see no logs for the device or that the hub even attempted to send the device a command. From the device page I send off command and see no changes to the device, it is still on from the on command I sent earlier in the day. I again look in event log and see nothing about sending a device off command or anything about a communication failure.
Is it normal for Hubitat to not log anything when it can't communicate with a device? I would expect to see a message that the device did not respond when commands are sent from the devices page and I would expect to see a log entry for sending commands but the log shows nothing.
Looking on the device page I see nothing at all that might give me any ideas on comm errors or signal level.
I'm actually in disbelief that Hubitat has such a silent failure here.
Any stock driver will only log command execution (things like "on()") when debug logging is turned on, and only if the driver author chose to do that. This doesn't happen in a lot of early drivers, but it seems to have become more common in recent drivers, particuarly Z-Wave (perhaps driven by that likely author's preferences--which I agree can can be helpful for things like this). But by default, debug logging is enabled for 30 minutes after adding a device or manually enabling it any time, then auto-disables after those 30 minutes are up.
So, in most cases, you won't see any logs from the mere act of sending a command. The other logging option in most drivers, info/descriptionText logging, just logs events from the device. This normally means the device has to communicate back to the hub for these to happen.
At the protocol level (and with Z-Wave, sometimes at the driver level), there may be limited "retry if no ACK"-type things built in, but I'm not sure of the details of each. But if you have mesh network/range problems, this is unlikely to help with that. Your best bet would be to look into or shar emore about the protcol and device you're using, as troubleshooting will be specific to each.
@mikee If you move your HE closer to the switch does it work? Does routing show in your settings>>z-wave details page? (Can you please post your z-wave details page in its entirety?)
Device in question is the 0x0B, I will guess the RSSI of -13 is the issue. I am a bit surprised to see it that low as compared to some of the numbers on other devices I have that travel thru more walls.
I moved it one outlet closer and RSSI goes to -5 and does work consistently now. I guess conditions were right when I first installed and tested it and assumed it was good.
I was not aware of this screen that shows signal levels. I found no help in the Hubitat documentation in relation to troubleshooting such issues. I also didn't find much in the community either.
What is considered a reliable RSSI level for zwave devices?
LWR RSSI: Calculated value of the RSSI (relative signal strength index) for the last working route (LWR) over each hop, compared to the background noise sampling (higher values above 0 are better)
So, the negative RSSI on 0x0B isn't good -- but there is no sharp, universal cutoff for "bad" on everyone's network. Various factors will affect different people's networks differently; these are just some tools you can use to make more informed decisions about yours.
