Hub lockups?

My hub locked up yesterday. The lights were blue but I couldn't access the hub so I had to unplug it..waited 10 seconds or so and plugged it back in. However, this seems to be happening about once a week. Is there any way to see the backend logs which might be able to tell me what is causing these lockups. Support said that there were a lot of errors and to disable apps to try to determine which is causing the problem. There should be an easier way to determine what is causing errors but my logs don't show anything. But it seems support can see more than we can.

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I have been having issues with my hub locking up every few days as well. I always get a red light and a reset always fixes it until it decides to lock up again. Support suggested that I uninstall all custom apps which I did and that did not fix my issue. It has been going on for about the last 4-6 weeks.

This type of question has been asked before - so I’d suggest ;
a) work with support
b) use β€œsearch”

Not helpful! a) I was working with support but then they drop off the face of the earth and I don't hear from them again.
b) I did use "search" but it doesn't seem to yield any real answers to this issue of hubs locking up. It is easy to say "disable all apps" but what good is that when your house is running on these apps!

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It's a round and round conversation and one that many of us have had with the HE team.

From a support perspective, I understand their position about disabling apps. They have no control over the code that we write and use on our hubs and as such, it's almost impossible for them to support their product with an almost unlimited amount of custom code running about. For troubleshooting, pretty much any company will first tell you to try disabling any apps that didn't come with the device out of the box. That's troubleshooting 101. It's not that it's easy to say, it's that it is the only way to isolate if the issue is with a custom app or driver or the base system itself.

What you could do is start disabling apps 1 by 1 and see if it improves the lockups. Also, enable debug logging on the custom apps/drivers you have running. That should provide more insight into apps that might not be behaving properly.

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Support certainly has it's challenges as more customers get on board. They have been very responsive to my queries but I haven't had to use them in a while...

My main hub lockup was caused by WebCoRE which I've since stopped using (but am still following). I've also had a few other issues with cloud apps/services that stopped responding due to internet/network issues. Maybe you can temporarily disable some of those. Also flaky or barely in range devices can cause slowness/delays etc.

Just my experience though..

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I ran into that as well. It didn't take down my hub, but it slowed it to a crawl when one of the web services I use wasn't responding and the dev didn't wrap the httpPostJson in a try/catch and ended up spamming the logs.

Support continually says they CAN'T see things that the users can't see. (believe that or not as you will... :smile:)

That said, I've said to them multiple times that it would be MUCH more helpful if they would cite/show the specific errors they see when telling users there are 'a lot of errors'. Even if they just copy/paste them.

They have done that on some of my support tickets, and it was hugely helpful in getting both sides on the same page. The ones where they don't, well, not as helpful.

So if support doesn't give enough detail, and if you haven't already, you may want to just ask for examples of the errors that they see.

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Even if that's true they know what to look for.. it would be nice to have some sort of built in diagnostic that could show these types of issues like high error rates separately from the logs. Maybe even a way to submit them directly to support.

The folks at HE constantly (and reasonably) say this is NOT really a developers platform but a consumer oriented home automation system, yet it seems they want us to parse through the logs, remove all devices/apps etc which can leave the average home user wanting and frustrated.. it's a very tricky balance and I don't envy the challenges they face as they hopefully grow and mature as a company.

if we only had access to some nicer tools/info.. :wink:

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What Apps and Devices are you using? You're definitely not alone in having this type of issue. I have experienced similar issues and I am always looking for a common denominator among users to see if we can help identify a problem app or driver.

Wait a minute... I see what you are doing there... :smile:

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That was the last contact I had with support - them saying that my hub was throwing a lot of errors and was probably going to lock up soon. I immediately looked at MY logs that are produced in HE and noticed a couple of errors but not many. Seemed to be coming from Smarthtings Event Pusher, so I disabled that. My hub locked up days later. I can't see any other errors in the logs. I asked them to tell me what errors they were seeing but I haven't heard from them since. So not helpful. These are the apps I am using:
Amazon Echo Skills
Departures
Echo Speaks
Ecobee Suite Manager
Groups and Scenes
Webcore ( only one piston running)
Hubitat Simple Lighting
Hue Bridge Integration
Konnected
Maker API
Notifications
Rule Machine
SmartLife RGBW Light
Sonos
Welcome Home

I dunno but I would seriously consider disabling WebCoRE.. I think that's a bit of a sore point with some of the HE staff. Ever since I stopped using WC things have been working better - but that is purely anecdotal and there are likely other things that contributed as well including my lack of experience at that time with the HE platform.

Do you have the latest and greatest WC?

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Yes, I have the latest update. I only run one piston because I can't figure out how to change it to a Rule in RM. I will post it in RM forum and see if anyone can help with this piston conversion. Still, if support says that your hub is throwing errors then why can't they tell you what they are?

I think there is some misunderstanding here.

If you are getting errors in your logs, you should be seeing them in your live logging as well. If there are any errors in the hub logs that are helpful and they do not show in the live logging then we open an issue to get that fixed so you can see the errors. For your specific hub there are no errors occurring currently that are not shown in live logging. We do not have a magic wand that tells us why your hub locked up. Our recommendation is to disable a user app or driver and see if that fixes the problem if it does not, then enable that app or driver and move on to the next one. If you can narrow it down to the app or driver that is causing the problem that helps everyone. As a company we cannot debug custom code, its just too time demanding.

The other misunderstanding is that it is not only apps that could cause a problem, custom drivers could as well. Its just that usually drivers are much simpler and so do not usually cause the issues that large (sometimes poorly coded) apps can cause.

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I hear you - I think others {..cough ... @JasonJoelOld .... cough} have been frustrated by this as well. Providing better diagnostics either through support or via some sort of diagnostic section (complementary to the logs) in the UI can only help reduce support calls I think. Reducing support calls is something the HE crew should definitely want to do as much as possible.. it will eat your resources and kill your innovation. I've had direct experience with this with some enterprise clients of mine.

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If I run the Live Logging and search for "Error" it should show any errors in the log, correct? At which point I should be able to see what is causing the error and then disable the problem. For instance, when I pull up my Past Logs, the only error I am seeing was from Ecobee not authorizing. This was because I did the latest update yesterday and apparantly I have to go into the app again and click authorize at which point it says authorized and then click Done and now there are no more errors. I have the Live Logging running and no errors are showing yet. Do Device driver errors show in the log as well?

There are 2 errors on your screen

Yes, but it must have been related to Ecobee authorization because as soon as I did the authorization it is also gone.

You don't have to guess where it is coming from, click on dev:676 it will highlight it in the list above or click on the red "error" and it will take you to the device in question. That is not an error from ecobee.

Regardless, that is not likely to be the cause of your issue.

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