Why does Hubitat show missing devices with neighbors and routes?

[neonturbo]

@rlithgow1

What your z-wave details are showing is an unhealthy mesh.

I would agree. It appears you have 6 dead or ghost nodes. That has to be screwing with things.

@brandonv

You missed my point. I removed them for testing purposes.

I didn't miss anything. You can't just break the mesh with removing devices and expect it to instantly recover, if it ever can.

@brandonv

I often run a full repair

Full repair isn't recommended on the C7, or with Zwave plus in general. Up to a point it is supposed to self-heal. IF you need to do a repair, just do the individual node repair.

@brandonv

What concerns me is that Hub is still reporting stale information after Repairs, reboots, power cycling

Some of this is just a mystery how it all works. I assume there is some caching of that data. You for sure can't count on it being live data. In my experience it takes a day or two to make that information seem even partially accurate. At some point if it does work, ignore the oddities. And when it doesn't, use that info as guidance not a bible of what is wrong.

@brandonv

This is why I have been trying to see what I can do to influence more efficient routing

There is nothing you can do to make this happen. I have banks of light switches in a few places around the house. Some of these are identical Zooz switches, and in other places they are mixed with Jasco/GE. Every switch takes a different route to the hub despite being right next to each other. Some are direct to hub, some 2 hops, some 4 hops, there is no rhyme or reason. As long as they work, I just shake my head and accept it.

@brandonv

and increasing neighbor devices.

That is about the most you can do. Provide plenty of neighbors, and routing options, and hope the Zwave (Silabs) firmware is smart enough to make good decisions. You appear to have enough devices you should have a good mesh at this point, sometimes when there are too few devices that repeat, you can have problems with instability.

[brandonv]

I don't have ghosts. I started in a "stable state" but did not get reliable function. So it was not healthy to begin with so it couldn't hurt trying to do some testing and understand behavior. It didn't make things worse. Same thing with full repair. I have waited several days for things to stabilize without improvement. I already have high density and am running out of places to add new devices. I have devices showing single neighbors but have multiple other devices in close proximity so adding more devices isn't helping anyway.

I currently have all enrolled devices connected back and all devices have routes. But I am still experiencing where some random devices will have lag or fail to respond even though they recently working and/or devices that need to be sent a command more than one time as well as some devices with only 1 neighbor despite multiple devices in close proximity.

[brandonv]

I currently have everything back online and still have issues. I am not sure what the problem with having devices paired as S2 is? It thought that was ok and it was S0 that you did not want to have. I have over 1/3 of my devices set to S2, which were most of the initial devices that I added. I did try to do a soft reset of my current enrolled devices but that did not help.

I feel like that if I am going to end up redoing a lot of my devices, I am better off factory defaulting everything and start over fresh but they seem to have removed that option to be easily done. Most of my original devices were movable (500 series) plugs for holiday lights, which got moved after they were set up.

Since then, I added more of my original purchase of 500 Series wall switches and now have started buying 700 series wall switches, which I have added over 1/2 in some key, well spaced places. I think that if I was to start over fresh and add those hardwired 700 and 500 series devices, working outward from the hub, then start adding back moveable plugs, things would work better.

It seems like several of those first few movable plus have "sticky routes" and appear in the path of other devices, even if they are further away from many other and closer devices. That is why I was trying to remove a few of them for testing. Just not clear on what is the best path forward to try to start over.

[rlithgow1]

Encryption by its nature carry's a lot of overhead in general. Every time you add encryption to the mix (as in each device) it compounds it. Not to say encryption is not a good thing but in the case of the mesh it really does slow things down a bit. Besides, if someone is sniffing your mesh, you'll see them from the street and the only thing they'll learn is that you turned on the kitchen light which they could see anyway from the street. That's why most simply encrypt locks and garage stuff. That said, even starting over, there is no guarantee that the routes your devices take will be what you think they should be. It's part of the voodoo of z-wave.

[neonturbo]

@brandonv

I currently have everything back online and still have issues.

Just so we are on the same page, does that mean you plugged the Zooz Zen25 outlets back in?

@brandonv

Just not clear on what is the best path forward to try to start over.

I wouldn't start over. It may not help anything, and it is a LOT of work to do so. You also aren't able to diagnose the root cause of your issues if you blindly reset everything.

I would contact support and see if they can see anything in the diagnostics tool. Maybe they can guide you to any issues. support@hubitat.com

[brandonv]

At the time of posting, yes both Zen25 were plugged back in as I was trying to normalize things. neither one are reporting power more than once an hour. I have since excluded one and the other is just a few feet away from the hub and directly connected.

I started with Hubitat support and did not get anywhere. They really did not answer my questions and said they did not see anything wrong with my setup and just told me to try reducing frequency of reporting from any device with power monitoring and to not use encryption. They just keep pushing me to reach out to the "community" for support. When I pressed them for explanation for some of things I was seeing, they said they would "escalate it to engineering for another look" but that was over a week ago. I just feel like they are blowing me off.

And now to add to the weird stuff I am seeing, I get this yesterday...

I have seen several times where I have had 5 hops to a device but this is the first time I have seen the same device shown twice in the same route path. I though four hops was the max and I can not seem to get anyone to comment on this and I certainly thought you could not have the same device twice in a route path. I tried to force a repair on this a couple times with no change but it eventually cleared itself of the second device entry in the route path.

And here is another weird thing I was seeing.

I have the following device (4A) listed under "Devices",

But I do not have a device 4A in my Z-Wave details.

Looks like I was able to just delete that device but it still concerns me that I keep seeing weird things on my hub.

Yesterday, I spent the better part of the day excluding most of my plugs, that I was using for holiday lighting and devices using S2. Right now. I just have two devices using S2, both are directly connected to the hub. 1 of them I can still set to "none" but it is a sensor mounted on the ceiling in my basement but I just have not taken it done yet. The other is a Gen 2 Ring Repeater, that I plan to leave as S2 as I read that setting it do "none" breaks the loss of power indication, as I want that feature later.

That was extremely painful as the hub and/or Z-wave network would not cooperate. I got lots of ghosts and I could not pair my z-wave stick to my hub to remove them and spent several hours trying to add back just a single device. I dang near reset my hub radio and started over at that point but I tried a soft reset first and then was able to to get my z-wave stick to pair and remove the ghosts and got all my lights added back in.

Currently, most of my included devices are just hardware switches with a few plugin devices that I plan to keep in that same spot for now. It has been like that since last night and I just wanted things to be able to settle down and "bake" overnight. I also removed all my apps for rules and dashboards so I can add them all back in with fresh devices. Later today, I plan on adding back in most of my plugs to get my holiday lights working again. Will have to see what happens after all that.

[Tony]

The format of the routing header includes fields for 4 repeaters, so if you starting counting at the first repeater, you'll count to 5 when you reach the destination. But only 4 'repeated hops' in total.

No calculated route should include the same repeater twice, but what the page shows (evidently) is not the calculated route, but the actual hops that the last routed message traversed, including nodes which got used as a result of transmission failures along the way. The node prior to the source of a failed hop knows this because a 'route NACK' message (containing the network header of the failed hop) gets sent to it whenever the next node in the route fails to hear a retransmission of the frame which it has repeated.

So in this case the hop from 41 to 42 was not successful (41 didn't hear 42 repeat the frame; even after retry attempts). So 41 tried a backup route, which included 3D.

[brandonv]

After re-adding the devices (and adding a 2nd dedicated Series 700 repeater), things are a lot better but not perfect. I no longer have devices with 4-5 hops. Most things are directly connected to the hub or there is only two hops but everything is now 3 or less hops. Also, Hubitat is much more accurate about displaying the true status of the a device. Before it was really bad about showing that devices were on when they really were off and vice versa. Also, all devices now have at least two neighbors and only a couple have only two now.

But my original issue is still not resolved. My two for groups of holiday nights do not reliably turn everything on or off and no pattern to which devices do not respond. But I can issue a command individually to each device that did not respond to the group command and the devices now better about responding then. I tried playing with metering between 50 and 250ms and with on/off optimization with no effects. There is also some lag

I am still am frustrated this does not work reliably when it seems like the devices work really well when issuing individual commands.