Nice solid looking "mesh", man
Great points and food for thought but...
If you sell a HUB that is able to, not necessarilly out of the box, talk to a wide range of Zigbee devices with additional help from Community drivers, your bound to hit issues here and there.
Bear in mind that alot, not all, but alot of certified devices come with a hefty price and therefore users opt for a cheaper solution.
this brings with it, unfortunately, uncertified devices which 9 times out of 10, the user has no idea that they're not 100% complient.
After continuous Hub slowdowns, I've started from scratch and have made many changes after reading endless forums, appreciated by the way and have changed just a couple of the following...
- Changed wifi channel
- Removed troublesome Zigbee devices
- Updated HE Drivers & Apps as new options become available
- Moved devices to a 2nd HUB
- Moved Apps to a different HE HUB
- Tried to spread the load accross 3 HE Hubs
- Analyzed xBee info
- Reintroduced 3 x Ikea Repeaters previously uninstalled
Trial & error has taken months of what does & doesn't work but would be awesome to see included utilities with HE for diagnosing faults?
Just saying IMHO.
3 Likes
Just ran across this thread and thought I'd add my own feature suggestion in this vein posted not long ago .
Looking around the forum there are numerous times this has come up and for good reason. It would seem to me that not addressing it is reminiscent of past lost opportunities in the HA space.
That is where frustration and the threshold to reach optimization was just high enough that some portion of the potential market avoided, gave up, or otherwise limited their use because they feared the reliability of what they couldn't readily verify.
I think this area of development is likely higher priority than many seasoned folk give it. Afterall, we are talking about verifying foundational network reliability and resilance...all the whizz bang layered on top is meaningless if something is broken/ not quite right/ not optimized and you don't have the tools onboard to understand where/why.
I don't buy the suggestion that the average user wouldn't benefit from Hubitat doing more in this area. Granted the issues can be multifaceted but there is a reasonable base of expectation folks bring from their WiFi experience that isn't even present here to look at.
2 Likes
I think the original feature request is a really good request.
In hubitat there is a lack of observability when it comes to the mesh that is missing. Its naive to argue that best practices is a substitute for observability, no one who builds any meaningful software for a living would live without logs and analysis and at scale automating and filtering the data is key to make the human informed.
I have more stability issues on hubitat than i had on smartthings which leads to requiring more serviceability, something which hubitat encourages in its interactions with the community. But serviceability in the mesh sorely needs a way to reason about the mesh and its current state and there just isn't great tooling for that on the platform.
The point about best practices is a bit wonky since that only work well when living in a static world where every interaction has been validate by the best practice and code doesn't change. But what works like that in the real world? I add devices and change my setup as i make alterations to my house, time of year and lifestyle. I don't have a fixed mesh, when the christmas lights come out they are automated ad-hoc and that gets removed when the season is over. When the summer is here i run the automation for my pool house far more frequently than i do any other time in the year. Interactions in the network aren't static and they change. I buy another lamp, lets put a smart plug on that. You get my point.
I think this is a request that is worth taking seriously.
From this thread Its clear to me that large networks lead to people creating homegrown observability systems to debug and triage errors. My network at 30 or so devices is approaching the point where this is getting important.
I should also state the obvious. i much prefer self-help than calling support. if i can solve something myself faster than support i will always be biased towards that! 
1 Like
There’s maybe not the tools you’re expecting. Not sure I even understand what it is you’re looking for, however there are tools.
For Zigbee:
http://[YOUR HUB IP]/hub/zigbee/getChildAndRouteInfo
For Z-Wave, look in the Z-Wave Details. You can see the route and last transmission rate. There’s also a tool to view the Z-Wave topology.
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If none of that helps there's also the hub stats to see what devices and apps are chewing up your hub.
http://hubitat.local/hub/enableStats (Run this to start stat collection and let it collect for about 5 minutes)
http://hubitat.local/hub/stats (Run this after the 5 minutes has elapsed to view the stats)
http://hubitat.local/hub/disableStats (Run this to stop stat collection)
For Winodws PC's Shift + Windows Key + S is an easy way to take a cropped screenshot.
You can use these links to track down the apps and devices by putting the id's from stats
http://hubitat.local/installedapp/configure/APPIDHERE
http://hubitat.local/device/edit/DEVICEIDHERE
8 Likes
cool. trying it now.
This is my report. about 10 minute sample.
Device 524 -529 are my sonos. even though i don't have anything playing on sonos i noticed in the log that they wake up frequently, i think they poll the sonos for track and volume information.
Device 535 is a garage door tilt sensor, i think it reported in battery.
Device 193 that ran 4 times is a motion senor, and there was motion there.
The rest are motion sensors.
Now over to the apps. App 236 is the amazon echo skill. what is the run time unit used? It can't be seconds but i could guess that a call to amazon could take 250 milli seconds to complete. And spending a cpu second on that every 10 minutes doesn't seem like a high cost.
335 is sonos integration app. Nothing was running so i'm surprised it ran.
I assume its normal for integration skills to run even though the service was inactive and not called from the gui or from the alexa or sonos endpoints?
device Stats enabled: false
Device stats start time: 1606869365737
Device stats total run time: 711661
device id 259 runcount 1 total runtime 13 average run time 13
device id 262 runcount 5 total runtime 144 average run time 28.8
device id 524 runcount 7 total runtime 518 average run time 74
device id 525 runcount 7 total runtime 212 average run time 30.2857142857
device id 526 runcount 7 total runtime 220 average run time 31.4285714286
device id 527 runcount 7 total runtime 195 average run time 27.8571428571
device id 528 runcount 7 total runtime 244 average run time 34.8571428571
device id 529 runcount 7 total runtime 328 average run time 46.8571428571
device id 535 runcount 1 total runtime 692 average run time 692
device id 193 runcount 4 total runtime 103 average run time 25.75
device id 428 runcount 1 total runtime 17 average run time 17
device id 227 runcount 1 total runtime 13 average run time 13
device id 263 runcount 1 total runtime 87 average run time 87
App Stats enabled: false
App stats start time: 1606869365740
App stats total run time: 711663
app id 236 runcount 3 total runtime 731 average run time 243.6666666667
app id 335 runcount 1 total runtime 1805 average run time 1805The only thing that seems weird is the garage tilt sensor. That should be around 25 regardless of what it's doing.
You might want to check out the community zwave mesh analyzer app. Hubitat Z-Wave Mesh Details
2 Likes
any idea how to sniff packets to see if some device are too chatty even though nothing is appearing inthe logs... the zniffer is not readily avail for download even though i have stick i could use it with?
Hmm not offhand. You have to load some firmware on the stick and then you can't use it to join devices. I don't know if you can revert the firmware either afterwards.
I think that tilt sensor is wonky. its giving me problems in reading it since day one. it was a used sensor from ebay, i should probably just get a new one.
I'm thinking about putting a hub in the garage and mesh it together with my main hub, the garage is at a sufficiently far away distance from the main hub that i think it would yield a stronger mesh out there anyway. this tilt sensor is in the absolute far away area in the garage.
thanks for your help!
thats fine if i can find the firmware and s/w i get a spare to use for that fx only
I was able to flash my UZB3 to use as a Zniffer and then later reflashed it to use as a secondary controller. Do not remember all the steps, but it can be done.
Edit: (6/26/2021)I only flashed a few times between firmware versions. Mine died today trying to flash back to use as a zniffer. I would recommend a second stick and not flashing multiple times.
3 Likes
Ya read it. I have an account but the sw is not there. Or the doc is out of date.
The doc is out of date. You now need to download the Simplicity Studio software. From that, all other packages you need to install (including Z-Wave Zniffer) are available as modules. You have to do everything (including the package downloads) from inside the Simplicity Studio software.
You still need an account with silabs.
1 Like
I just followed the link in that doc and the Software was there, still.
Scroll to the bottom of that page and on the right is this:
I clicked the Zniffer option and was offered a login. I did and got this screen:
Including the download file.
That definitely did not work for me over the weekend at all. Silicon Labs website consistently pointed me back to the software page for Simplicity Studio, without making it obvious that it allowed for the modules to be downloaded through it. It was very frustrating, but once I figured out the Simplicity Studio bit, it made much more sense.
I would not be surprised if this was related to having a new account with Silicon Labs, or if you're already established as a developer with them. I'm not a developer, so it might have been limiting me to only certain types of downloads.
ok thanks.. got the file.. now the questions is the f/w for the stick. i aassume i can only use that specific stick (i only have aeotec zstick) so i need to find the fw and buy that specific stick? any links thanks
