I’m experiencing a similar issue to @dastrix80. Often Alexa will say that the device is not responding. It is an intermittent problem. I can ask for the same device to be turned on several times, and sometimes it works immediately, other times will work only after several attempts. This affects all devices. I
Using the OpenHab app directly works as expected, as does asking Alexa for other information like the weather.
It may be coincidental, but after the restart of mongodb and the back end servers (openHAB Cloud: pool is draining/destroyed), the issue went away for a while, however it’s back now.
Overall I’d say this has been an issue since Early September.
@msexton187 - curious if you’re seeing the issue again?
I will add to this that I have now started experiencing the same. I would also add that it started once I updated to 4.2.1 a few days ago. I do not use Mongo DB though.
I just wanted to add to the thread that I am also seeing this problem in 4.3.0.M1 (and have been for several months on earlier versions as well) and can’t find a solution. I am not going to downgrade because this doesn’t break anything, it’s just annoying all of us (the family) that every time we ask Alexa to do something she responds that “the device is unresponsive” even though the action is usually carried out correctly.
I’m willing to help troubleshoot or provide logs if anyone can tell me what would be useful.
Same here- I’m still seeing this issue, happens several times on a given day seemingly at random. Happy to provide logs if needed, though it doesn’t appear to throw any errors locally.
Similar issues here, running 4.2.2-1 on a Pi 4B. Zwave devices unresponsive at 1st request but then seem to work at 2nd try, same with RFXTRX requests. Hit and miss. Kinda frustrating
I’ve been having this same problem as well. I’m on openHAB 4.1.2 docker container running in an x86-64 bit server. Lower version than most other people having the problem.
We use Alexa often to turn lights on or off. Sometimes it fails and Alexa says the hub the device is connected to is not responding. These days we get < 50% success rate. A lot of times it will succeed on the second attempt if it fails the first time. Sometimes I can try 3 or 4 times without success and have to get out my phone and change the lights in the app.
I believe my issue started around the August time frame of the other thread, and when the openHAB servers were rebooted and/or tinkered with I believe there was a few days of relief.
I’ve been on 4.1.2 since April in this configuration. I believe the Alexa stuff worked perfectly at that time and has only recently been an issue on the same time frame as what other people are seeing. I did not change or upgrade my openHAB version in that time frame which makes me think it must be an issue with openHAB cloud.
I’m happy to help debug if there are specific logs or anything that I could share.
Just wanted to briefly chime in to let you know that I also see this problem however it is much less frequent for me. Most of the time everything runs smoothly, sometimes I get the response that the device is not responding though it actually works and today I had the very rare case that Alexa was right when telling me that the device is not responding.
I was having Alexa fail to control my devices so frequently in the last month or so that I decided to try something today that seems to have resolved it. I decided to deploy a private version of the Openhab Alexa skill. That seemed to fix it.
This makes me think that there is a scaling problem ( maybe not enough lambdas allowed to run simultaneously ?) in the aws infra that is setup for the official Openhab Alexa skill.
One more thing, if you get it all working you’ll end up with a duplicate device for each device in your Alexa app. In addition, the new devices that you had Alexa discover from your private skill won’t work ( nothing will happen if you click on them) until you delete the old duplicate ones ( those will be obvious because they will be the ones that have a visual indicator of an issue) in the Alexa App. This means you’ll also have to reconfigure your Alexa groups and routines that were using the old device entries to use the newly discovered ones instead.
I’m having the same issue on 4.1.2
device is not controlled, and alexa complains it’s not responding.
Side note: I have some routines setup to control openhab variables when I say specific custom phrases. Those simply fail without complaint.
However, I noticed if I simply ask again, it tends to work. (for both direct commands and routines that trigger openhab variable changes)
I’m considering creating a sort of keep-alive that has alexa change an openhab variable periodically, just to keep the connection alive, or perhaps repaired.
I’m having similar issue since upgrading from OpenHAB 3.2 to OpenHAB 4.2.1. In my case, if it says “Device is not responding” it doesn’t turn it ON/OFF. After few tries, or after waiting for minute or two, it works (turning device ON/OFF and not saying that “Device is not responding”). It happens throughout the day, in random intervals, and with random items.
Hopefully, somebody with deeper knowledge of how connection to Alexa works and what might be the problem will see this thread.
Sorry for the delay. I configured it to go though myopenhab.org. I did not create my own cloud instance. Alexa with openhab has been working flawlessly since I did this.
Not sure if this helps with the de-bugging, but the problem of Alexa responding “Device xyz does not respond” appears to become more persistent over time (up until ~80% of all commands end like this), until I reboot openHAB. Then everything works perfectly again.
Same here. I’m on 4.2.2 running in a Docker container. Updated it a couple of days ago. Before that, everything worked fine.
For Persistence I use maria, influx and mapdb if that matters.
When I restart the container, voice commands working for a short time. But then some items stop responding (and they actually do not work via Alexa). Some are working as always and some have a noticeable delay from command to execution.
Update to yesterday‘s post: 12 hours after a restart, same problem (I responding via Alexa voice commands). Will try to spend some time digging into this the next couple of days.
Since 2-3 days I’m seeing the same like @jonnydev13 - which is really annoying. For me it’s even 80% of the time not working. If I repeat a couple of times then it works. But directly after that not anymore. I can also see sometimes that Alexa says device is not responding but a bit later the light turns on. Sometimes If I turn off the whole first floor, some lights also don’t go off but also she does not complain about not responding devices.
I already restarted openhab a couple of times, but for me it is not fixing it. Cloud connector seems to work when checking the status on myopenhab.org. But I would also assume something is wrong with the openhab servers not responding quickly enough. Openhab status says “green”, but no clue what this monitoring does under the hood. What is the socket timeout for this monitor check? Maybe Alexa’s is less and hence it appears to be working.
Maybe some of the myopenhab admins could check the servers if something is going on there?
Could be a rate limiter kicking in, one faulty service in the load balancing group (which could explain the random behavior) etc.
I’m on openhab 4.2.1 via Openhabian located in germany.
I started following this topic about a month ago when I got frustrated enough to look into the issue. It felt like it was failing about half the time when using Alexa. It worked 100% of the time when using the openhab app or web and rules. I have not done anything to address the issue. Not even a reset. Over the last few days I have not had any problems.
