Question

I keep hearing about outages but I’ve never had a single outage. I’m not trying to be cocky, just curious why? Could it be that I’m still using V1 hub?  

Answer 1

V2 here and no issues

Answer 2

I think it's based on your physical location

Comments

@hague depends on what shard you are in.  

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As @anatolia7046 suggests, it will be typically be the database shard you were assigned on sign up, rather than your current location. The earlier users (which seem to include me) are all on one shard (graph. api. smartthings. com) but later ones were assigned to regional ones. It is a source of irritation to me that status reports refer to problems for users in 'the Americas' while I am getting battered in the UK as it is never clear whether they mean a particular shard or shard, or whether they do mean a physical location.  

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@navarro close, graph is a front end that redirects to the correct shard for your account like a proxy. There's other functions too but It's intended to allow apps that need to speak to the groovy ide (mostly oAuth) to connect to a single endpoint without worrying what shard a user was actually on.  

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@anatolia7046 No, graph. api. smartthings. com is also the name of a shard (effectively NA01). I believe you may get redirection if you go to somewhere like graph. api. smarthings. com/location/list and login there, but otherwise you don't which is why old documentation that refers to graph. api. smartthings. com is problematic and users need to be advised to use account. smartthings. com first. It does also act as a single endpoint for some things as you say, typically returning the actual endpoints you need to use. So it is a bit of a mish-mash.  

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@navarro you are correct, pandemic driven Mandela effect maybe? They were going to split the graph identity but that was just about the time Samsung came in and they had to add Samsung accounts anyway. (I haven't referred to graph for years. ) In any case, I'm just glad im not on NA04 - that one seems to bounce like a rubber ball.  

Answer 3

My hub dropped out tonight - it looked like it was down for around an hour and a half. When it came back the zigbee devices were offline for a while but came back eventually. (East coast)

Answer 4

I've been a ST user for 6 years now. I've never experienced first hand an outage. I've received emails telling me there was an outage. I've read about outages online. But I've never never noticed any of my automations not run because of a ST outage. I have had problems twice (maybe 3, idk) with WebCoRE fucking up daylight savings, but that's not a ST outage

Comments

Some automations are local. For example my motion triggered lights worked fine during this outage but i couldn't control the fans.  

Answer 5

It was all of 90mins

Answer 6

So I believe it has something to do with different "shards". A shard is essentially the server you are on for the Smartthings cloud. I would assume some shards could be seeing issues, and others aren't. I wasn't home but once saw the email I tried running my status update piston in webcore and it wasn't working. Tried a while later and it was. So I'm going to assume I saw the outage, but can't be 100%

Comments

Exactly, shards are compute nodes in the SmartThings system. Not everyone shares the same shard. There are at least 4 for North America alone. Outages can and usually affect ome shard while leaving the others none the wiser. Its a hard concept to explain to the general public, and often they dont know what shards are affected during initial reporting so they usually leave it out of the general outage notices.  

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Guess I’ve been lucky too, as I’ve not sharded either.  

Answer 7

People subscribe to updates on status. smartthings. com.  

Answer 8

I received 3 "hub back online" messages today, but none that it had went off lol. I wasn't home, so can't say, but everything is working fine since I got here (webCoRE pistons included). Even added 4 Sylvania lights with no issues.  

Comments

Hub offline is most likely your own internet connection failing. I get that occasionally, my synology NAS also alerts at the same time.  

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@silkweed419 Not likely. Mine went offline yesterday. When it does I usually get a notification from ST of an issue.  

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Well, my experience is that it's almost always down to a transient local network or ISP issue. Rarely anything to do with ST itself.  

Answer 9

Digging them by the way. 22$ for 4 is a steal.  

Comments

@likelihood you got 4 rgbw smart bulbs for $22? Link?  

Answer 10

I've had outages on on a V1. They all seem to be related to webcore

Answer 11

I'm a V2 user. 6 years. Very little problems and only once have I had a GE light switch fail. I am very happy with it. I will say, I have my house on a backup generator, and my wi-fi & ST on battery backup. The only time it ever goes down is if internet itself is down.  

Answer 12

I suspect many people are on different servers and some servers are more stable than others.