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Fibaro – not reliable enough for home automation


Igy

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First of all I have to say, that I’m using Fibaro for more than 3 years intensively for myself and some of my customers. So far didn’t find better solution for all use cases I have, but I think its time to start to look more intensively for alternatives. Why? Here are the most critical reasons:

  1.  Remote system access – each time I do connect to HC from outside, I’m getting little bit nervous whether I do succeed. Its cause mostly by Fibaros issues in past with remote access. Unfortunately its back these days. This unreliability will most probably persist because of past experience. No imagine, what are the all sexy use cases for, when you can’t access this system remotely. I can’t arm/disarm the alarm when housekeeper comes to my house, neither to change the heating system setting, or extra irrigate a garden. Suddenly you lose control and comfort, just because Fibaro can’t provide reliable service. It’s a pity that 20€ IP camera from China is more reliable with remote access than 600€ Fibaro system!  I didn’t have any issue connecting to those Chinese IP cams ever (I’m not touching security issue here).
  2. Push and email notifications – problem of past days that persist from Sunday till now (Wednesday). Imagine that you won’t receive notifications from your bank about transaction for such a long time? In my case, notification take very critical part in the system. Im being notified when Solar system start/stop to produce electricity (to fine-tune the system), alarm notifications including snapshots from cameras, smoke or flood notifications to ensure that everything is OK. Can I relay on such a system now? Maybe my house is on fire at this moment I’m writing this article…
  3. Bugs and bugs and bugs – every new update I’m getting excited about new features and bugs fixed. However on the other side, every new update I’m scared of new bugs that appear in system. Its kind of Fibaros best practice, fix one think and “develop” some new bugs on already working features (e.g. weather trigger issue, VD icons issue, VD stops working issue etc…)
  4. Support – and last but not least, Fibaro support, for such a critical system as a home automation is, should be much better and 24/7. Come on guys, the fact that there is a holiday in Poland, doesn’t mean that all home automation owners across the world can wait for several days for your help! Not mentioning the fact, that “Missing template” for Aeon micro switch is persisiting in my system since the very beginning (3 years!) without any option to remove it. Downloaded template provided to fibaro support for a few times in the past…
  5. Development of user requested features – there are tons of requests on Fibaro forum, asking Fibaro to fix or develop small features that would significantly improve user experience. One of the examples is “low battery notification” being send by email every half an hour!!! That represent 96 emails if I’m away from a home for a weekend!!!  

 

So to conclude, I’m staying with Fibaro, but only until a time I do find a suitable alternative for my use cases. Then, good bye Fibaro.  

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Hi @Igy!

 

There are safety measure in place but even the best ones happen to fail.

 

We're very sorry for the inconvenience. 

 

And it's truly diversified, it's a cluster of many servers connected independently, but unfortunately a network infrastructure of a higher level went down.

 

Remote access and push notifications are now working.

 

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  • Hi  I.Srodka, I understand that situations like this can happen. But as I wrote above, this is unfortunately only one of the issues... 

     

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    Overall it is getting more mature!  The direction is ok in my opinion. (24/7 and disaster recovery is high on my list as a bare minimum).

     

    Maybe the speed of new features  isn’t but that is a balance between cost, profits(Or chance of profits)  and capabilities.

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    Important services must have 24/7/365 monitoring. And should have a response team assigned.

     

    What Fibaro should to is also to IMMEDIATELY put a status thread here, explaining the issue, impact and if possible, time of solution.

     

    Edited by robw
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    @S500 CZ, your post was hidden because it did not contribute in any way to the thread. Stop spamming.

    It's Fibaro Support not 'Fibara'.

     


    @Igy, @barend121 and @robw, thank you guys for your opinions. We love constructive feedback and we are always taking it seriously.

    We strive to provide the best experience to our users and you, users, are the best source of feedback that can show us a way of improving our service ;)

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    Even if many of us complain about this issue, personally I want to say that with Fibaro I have not had many issues with the service (until this weekend and today). I won't say a name, but during this summer I had to use another brand's gateway. When I compare them to Fibaro, there is no question about which system is more reliable, and that is Fibaro. Also support from Fibaro is much better. Thank you, Fibaro.

    Edited by robw
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    I come from Zipato and can share with you Fibaro almost is heaven on earth compared to what I experienced with Zipato. 

    Fibaro did not let me down so far (8 months) of course with the exception of some glitches, but these things happen.

    Keep up the good work.

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    I'm using Fibaro in the last 5 years without any issue and it's the only way to control my house...

    A small advice. Keep it simple without no more then 10-15 scenes, restart it monthly and keep the device in a cold place. 

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    11 hours ago, I.Srodka said:

    Hi @Igy!

     

    There are safety measure in place but even the best ones happen to fail.

     

    We're very sorry for the inconvenience. 

     

    And it's truly diversified, it's a cluster of many servers connected independently, but unfortunately a network infrastructure of a higher level went down.

     

    Remote access and push notifications are now working.

     

    Is your data-center and network not redundant? :?:

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    3 minutes ago, Sjekke said:

    Is your data-center and network not redundant? :?:

    Up to some point.

     

    We cannot have a failover at some very high levels. It was a network problem way beyond our network configuration.

     

    Although it is possible that we may locate servers in different countries in the future.

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    16 hours ago, T.Konopka said:

    @S500 CZ, your post was hidden because it did not contribute in any way to the thread. Stop spamming.

    It's Fibaro Support not 'Fibara'.

     


    @Igy, @barend121 and @robw, thank you guys for your opinions. We love constructive feedback and we are always taking it seriously.

    We strive to provide the best experience to our users and you, users, are the best source of feedback that can show us a way of improving our service ;)

     

     

    @T.Konopka

    Hi,

    I understand by what you write that it was at a hosting company or even out at the network provider something happened. At the hosting company, every serious actor have redundancy on the switchers, routers. But as I don't know where it happened in the chain, I don't know.

     

    As I wrote earlier, for this network issue, an immediate sticky post in the forum saying "We currently can't provide push services to to a fault at a provider that is beyond our control". The company I work at provide important IT services, and our services do rely on functioning networks, networks that we don't manage and have control over. But we do ping them and do checks, so we now if something outside of our reach go bad. Then we can quickly give information to our customers that the service might have issues, but it is not in our service but a network issue at another company. The first a customer sees is that the service is not working, they don't know where the real issue is.

     

    Of course, that would mean you need to have active checks implemented on various networks. And a response team at Fibaro who can handle that. As you sell and market your products worldwide, you probably have personel working covering all time zones, if not, you probably should have first-line that at least monitor the service on evening/nights/weekend and can write at the forum..

     

    I'm a bit more wiser having been force to use another brand's Z-wave gateway this summer, where information where non-existent, promised updates years late, active censoring on the forum, open tickets "resolved" and "closed" when they were not solved etc. Customers are leaving that brand.

     

    All I can say you can go a long way with customer happiness just to give fast and accurate information. People will understand if the issue is not something Fibaro can do anything about. And a message here will make it easier on your support, and also avoid having your customers desperately searching for problems in their system, network, phones etc.

     

    Anyway, thank's for the update!

    Everyone, have a nice day!

     

     

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    @T.Konopka

     

    I believe Fibaro has heard this all before. This is a reiteration of issues reported and commented for years. We have seen improvements  over time - that should be expected. Sometimes we have as well had the feeling of a step forward, and one or two back - that is unfortunate and should become less and less frequent  as z-wave and Fibaro´s solutions mature.

     

    The two things that Fibaro can and should fix immediately  once and for all is a System Status Board and 24/7 support.

     

    The first should be fairly easy to implement.

    The second should be easy to implement as well, but would arguably involve a running cost - I hope Fibaro´s hopes and ambitions for their system warrants a solution like this. 

     

     

     

    Edited by 1152
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  • OK, I think I should be honest and add my new experience to this post. Last week I had a chance to test new Vera Secure controller. From first look on specification, it seemed to be a nice unit with integrated backup battery, siren, SIM card, supporting all wireless communication protocols. Also first registration and walkthrough the device installation within own network was quite a nice experience. But that’s all. Compared to Fibaro, it’s a far far away in terms of usability, UI and functionality. I was trying to setup basic scenes as I’m used to in Fibaro, but it was just pain in the ass. By this, I don’t want to say that Fibaro doesn’t have its own bugs (see my initial post), but I’m glad that it’s such advanced compered to Vera. Not mentioning the poor Vera mobile app and its responses. Good job Fibaro J

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