I’ve been using Device Watchdog to monitor a few Zigbee outlet plugs (Sengled) that I use to trigger some relatively non-essential security components and other relatively non-critical tasks. E.g., one provides power to turn on an amplifier that annunciates verbal warnings to “warn” people off my property under certain conditions (my electronic version of the old man yelling “get off my lawn” lol) and another controls a trickle charger to keep some SLA batteries healthy.
At any rate, DW sends me a push notification when any of these outlet powered plugs go inactive for 2 hours just so I can keep an eye on them should something go wrong with my Zigbee connection to Hubitat. Although this has been working, I also set up a dashboard to monitor the devices for a quick visual check.
Because the Sengleds do not have a “presence” nor a “last activity” attribute (only “on” or “off”), I have set up a RM app to trigger a DW report (without push for obvious reasons) every hour at 59 minutes after the hour in order to see if DW is able to detect the plugs. When a report is generated by DW, it causes the plug to report a “last activity” even though the only attributes on these plugs is “on” or “off” state. I had to do this at 59 minutes after the hour because for some reason it would stop reporting if I set it up on the hour when it became 12am (I think it is a bug in RM periodic triggers).
I could not use the DW alternative report trigger for devices that do not have a “last activity” attribute because it works by turning on then off the device periodically, which in my use case, would trigger a siren or a loud verbal announcement each hour.
At any rate, since I was able to get around this DW limitation by triggering a report without actually turning on and off the plug, on my monitoring dashboard I can quickly see if the “last activity” time of my plug is within 2 hours of the last DW report time. I have a RM rule that indicates if any device goes inactive as a tile on my dashboard.
My question is this: As you can see from my screenshot of the dashboard, for some reason, only three of the four outlets update every 60 minutes. Sometimes, all four update and the DW Report time is the same as the device Last Activity time. This is very inconsistent. In DW, I’ve tried varying the delay between devices when they are checked for activity (you can set a delay time up to 3 secs as DW states that “sometimes HE is too quick for the device to respond”) but this does not seem to have any effect.
I’m not too concerned as this cobbled together warning system is working (I have tested it by unplugging a device and seeing if I get an inactivity notification) but I am curious as to why sometimes the Last Activity updates, and sometimes it does not. Fortunately, I have never had it fail to update for any given device two hours in a row, but the OCD in me bugs me that the update times do not always match the report time when I know the Zigbee device is working and connected. Thanks in advance for any help in solving this.
