Long Delays Today before Vera Notifications & Emails are Delivered

Community Playground General Discussions
1

I can almost always depend on Vera Alert Notifications to be triggered very quickly, but this afternoon and evening, the Notifications and redundant emails have been seriously delayed in delivery, between 3 or 4 minutes and up to 40 minutes. They are time-stamped properly, but just extremely slow in delivery.

I don’t know if this is a problem that is localized to my system, or if it is system wide, but it’s quite troubling, since I depend on these Notifications for security and leak detection.

2

Along with the Notification delays that I started to experience yesterday, I see that for the first time, some of the delayed email notifications show the sender as From "(unknown sender), rather than the normal “Vera Notification”. The detailed Gmail view of the sender shows it as “via notify.mios.com”, which Gmail says indicates that the email was sent from a different domain than the purported domain.

I don’t know if the Notification delivery delays and the From: (unknown sender) are interrelated or not, but it is an odd coincidence. I’m also noticing that the Notifications are sometimes out of sequence with the actual events.

3

I have noticed some tardiness as well but it is not consistent. In my case, iPhone Locator is not seemingly detecting me being home, or, just the notifications are taking an extra minute or so. When I get the notifications, it comes in a flood. In my set up, PLEG/Scenes send a message via VeraAlerts to VeraMate which pops up on my iPhone. Lots of places between Vera and my phone that could be the source of the delay. I noticed the delay at lunch both yesterday and today, but no delay going back to work or coming home tonight, or last night, or going to play cards last night, or my wife coming home (although I was not there to witness the delay).

4

I confirmed that my VeraEdge is responding to events and triggering promptly, so my water leak detection function is well, despite the variable delays in getting the Notifications, but I’m really concerned with the Security Notifications. Delays up to 40 minutes just won’t work for me.

I also rebooted the VeraEdge, with no change in behavior. I really suspect that there is currently an issue with the notify.mios.com server causing the delays. I sure hope it gets resolved soon.

5

The GetVera status page is not showing any alerts on the notification servers.

6

Thanks for sharing that, BOFH. I had no idea it existed. It doesn’t support my theory, but I’m glad to have the info. I obviously have no idea where the problem is.

I just generated a couple more alerts, and they were both pushed out to the app and email instantaneously, for the first time since yesterday afternoon. I’ll cross my fingers and hope for the best.

7

I’m wondering if app notifications are routed via Google (android) or Apple (iOS) servers rather than directly from the GetVera notification servers to the device. If so the problem may have lain there.

I don’t know about emails as I use the SMTP plugin and route all email notifications via my own mailserver so if they are slow I have full logging to see what is going on. Now that I have unlimited texting on my cell plan, I’ll probably use my mail server to send texts to my carrier’s email to txt gateway directly and see if that is faster than app notifications.

8

I did notice that emails, app Notifications and texts all were late when the problem was occurring, then they would appear in a cluster.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

9

That could have also been your cell phone carrier then as well based on your statement…

10

Yes, that’s definitely a possibility. I’m using Straight Talk via AT&T, but all of these occurrences came while I was on WiFi, though. It seems that the problem has come and gone, after about 24 hours. I’ve tried several times last night and today, and the response has been almost instantaneous.

11

[quote=“vicw, post:8, topic:196401”]I did notice that emails, app Notifications and texts all were late when the problem was occurring, then they would appear in a cluster.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk[/quote]

Notifications are delayed in two scenarios:

  1. Possible issues with our event servers which can be checked at [url=http://status.getvera.com/]http://status.getvera.com/[/url]

  2. Local problems with the internet connectivity

When Event server cannot be reached by the unit because of one of the two mentioned reasons. The unit will queue up the notification , and they will be sent as soon as the Event server is reachable again. This process has been improved lately so it won’t cause spam, when service is resumed.

The flow is the following :

Vera → Remote Event server(MMS) → Mobile apps via push/ or email/sms . There is no other intermediary service.

12

Thanks for the info John M… That should be helpful if the problem returns. The failure is a bit of a mystery to me. http://status.getvera.com doesn’t show any outages or issues during the problem period, and I didn’t notice any other internet issues during that time either.

If it ever does occur again, especially with the most extreme delays of up to 40 minutes, I hope I will be in a position to check my linternet pathways for responsiveness to see if there is a correlation that I can make sense of.