Heal report: What do the checkmark and circle-slash mean?

Community Playground Getting Started & Initial Setup
1

I ran a Heal and now I’m viewing the report, and some device have checkmarks next to them while other have a circle with a slash through it.

I have some devices with 5 stars, and most have checkmarks but one has a circle-slash. I have some devices with two stars, and most have circle-slash but a couple have checkmarks.

What do those symbols mean?

(Yes, I already searched the forums, to no avail.)

Thanks!

2

What does it say next to the icon? Configured:

Star indicate the reachability of the device. I believe that it is a function of signal strength and available routes.

The green check mark indicates that the device was successfully configured during the heal. A Red circle with a slash through it indicates that Vera failed to configure that device during that heal operation.

A device that failed to configure may not indicate a problem. Sleeping battery operated devices, for instance, sometimes fail to configure during a heal, but still operate properly. Failure to configure may also be due to poor signal strength or poor routes making the device unreachable from Vera. Additional heals may fix this, but usually more intermediate nodes are necessary.

3

As far as I’ve experienced with battery operated devices (mainly sensors) who likes to go sleep ;-)… you can run a HEAL process and just before start… do click 3 times in the inclusion button of the battery operated sensors…

apparently, this 3 clicks send out a awake packet or similar that will allow vera complete the heal process…

Experts, correct me if I’m wrong…

thx

4

I get it now, and thanks.

But what does circle-slash mean? Don’t do this! Which threw me for a loop. I was trying to figure out why Vera would be forbidden from configuring some dimmers but not others. :slight_smile:

5

I’d like to hitch along on this thread with my related question… When VERA auto-heals at 1AM, the final heal report shows NO stars - just outlines of stars for each device - and green check marks for everything. But, when I manually force a repair, I get virtually 100% 5-star reports. Some have only 4, and my power door locks might have 3 - but everything else is 5-star.

So, my question has to do with reliability of the “star meter”, or the signal. Is it like checking your cholesterol or blood pressure, where it’s very dynamic and you never get the same reading twice? Just seems to me with such an extreme range in the report, it makes confidence level quite low.

6

Green check marks indicate that the device was successfully configured.

With Vera’s default settings, no stars with automatic heal is the normally observed behavior. Manual heals display stars.

It remains unclear, at least to me, what the stars are based on. They could be based on signal strength, route quality, hop count, ping responses, or any combination of these. But, I can find no documentation that covers the matter.

I would recommend that you regard the stars simply as an arbitrary metric with very little real world meaning. I regard them as good for observing differences, e.g. when adding a node increases a devices stars from 3 to 5 is a positive change.

But, many devices with 1 or zero stars will work just fine. So, unless you have a real and specific issue that you are trying to resolve(which stars may or may not help with) I would recommend ignoring stars completely. They are information, but it is of little value.

7

I did a manual heal because suddenly my z-wave net was taking as much as ten seconds to respond when I am used to almost instantaneous response. I was watching it heal and noticed that it seem to be acting on one particular device. How exactly does the heel work? Does it only work to heal the nodes that have shown errors or does it work on all nodes.

8

While you can run a heal operation against a single node, the normal heal and manual heal are on the entire Z-Wave network(all devices).

A heal tests each node for reachability, asks each node for its neighbors and their signal strength, then Vera calculates routes for each node. Vera repeats the process a few times to try to determine the best routes for each device. After everything is calculated, Vera configures each node telling it what routing table to use, as against the routing table that each device would build on it’s own based on the built-in Z-Wave routing algorithm. It likely does more, but these are the things that we can observe.

By default Vera runs a heal automatically each night, if any communications failed due to route failure during the day. On anything but the smallest networks this means a heal runs just about every night.

9

By how long it takes on my network with over a hundred nodes I thought that was the case. However while I was logged into Vera through UI5 I noticed only one node with the blue flag below it stating things like, "node 36, 0 good routs out of 0. No other device was getting these flags.

10

The process works on one device at a time. Keep watching and, if you stay awake, you’ll see the same on other devices.

11

Given that the heal takes so long and seriously lags my home automation, I tend to do it manually. What improvements is there on the Vera routing as compared to the devices own routing?

12

It depends on each environment, but in most cases, Vera routing has proven to be superior, which is why MCV chose it as a default.

More details on this and routing can be found all over this forum. It has been a topic of discussion for years.