IFTTT Triggering multiple devices not working

This is a weird problem. I'm not exactly sure what causes this - whether it is rate limiting or what.

I had some old wifi smart outlets that I didn't want to get rid of when I switched to hubitat. They worked great with Alexa and Google Home, but there's obviously no direct integration with hubitat. So I did a little research and found that you can still control them with IFTTT. Great! (I know SmartLife dropped their IFTTT support, but another company Brilliant created a clone and still supports IFTTT. They've said they're perfectly fine with people using the service like this.)

Here's the issue - if you send commands too quickly, only the first command actually makes it through. For example, I have two lights in my living room connected this way. If I hit the button for Light 1, then immediately hit the button for light 2, only light 1 turns on. If I give a short delay, both will turn on. Likewise, if I say "Alexa, turn on light 1" or "turn on light 2" it works fine. If I say "Turn on living room lights" which Alexa understands based on room grouping, only light 1 turns on. I know the alexa command worked with hubitat because the virtual switch will show ON even though the command didn't actually make it through IFTTT.

Someone had a similar problem a year ago, but no great fix: IFTTT reliability? Can't send mulitiple triggers?

That thread talks about introducing delays, which I suppose is a workaround, but not really the experience that I'm looking for.

I don't know if there's a way to see logs on the IFTTT end to see what is being received. I'm also not sure where to look in Hubitat to see exactly what is being sent to IFTTT, though I'm sure the logs are available somewhere.

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions on why this might be happening or if there's a fix/workaround, or even where to look for the log files.

Thanks!

I could be wrong of course, but I bet that this is a IFTTT limitation rather than a Hubitat limitation. I am almost certain they rate limit incoming and probably outgoing calls.

IFTTT has never been that great with situations like you are trying to do, and I doubt it has got better recently. That is one of the reasons I stopped using IFTTT, and went with local only (Zwave, Zigbee) devices.

I don't have any great ideas how to work around this, other to just replace those plugs. Maybe someone else does?

What @neonturbo said.

For IFTTT logs, if you open your account info, there should be a "view activity" link somewhere that pulls up a list of your applets that ran. Clicking on an applet in the list will bring up more info. The process might be slightly different on iOS vs Android vs a computer, but it's somewhere under your account.

Could you define a virtual switch and expose that to IFTTT.
Then have a rule when virtual switch turns on/off, turn on,/off your 2 light.

Slightly more complicated, but I've found that IFTTT will respond quicker, and with no loss of requests, to a series of WebHook calls. I'm sure there are various methods to generate, but my go to right now is webCore.

That was my assumption too - that it's a rate limiting issue on IFTTT's side. You're right, I don't think it's a Hubitat issue as the commands reliably get through when you send them one-at-a-time. I'm just curious if there's a way to improve the integration.

That's actually what I'm doing. It works well for switches one-at-a-time, but doesn't work well when you try to hit one switch and then immediately hit the next.

Interesting - is there any documentation or reference guide that you can point me to? I'd be willing to try that to avoid having to replace $200 worth of devices - and it'd be a good exercise for me :).

I think either I've misunderstood you or visa versa but use the virtual switch to control the 2 switches via RM.

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In webCore you can either use the built in IFTTT request or construct the web request on your own. I prefer to construct my own because I can then use passed arguments to reuse the same piston from multiple rules. Below is a snippet of one of my pistons

event is the webhooks event name from the applet that you have created and key is the IFTTT instance key which can be found by signing into IFTTT and then navigating to https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks/settings (it's the string of characters after /use/ in the URL)

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Oh - you're right, I misunderstood you. I don't know if that will work though, but maybe. I'd have to have one switch that triggers multiple actions in IFTTT. Annoying but maybe workable. Thanks for the idea.

This is cool, I'll have to give it a try.

This might actually help me with another project I've been working on too.

Thanks!

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