new ticket submitted, getting tried of how they cant fix things themselves, this should be an easy one as they have fixed before, its like restart the MQ process or whatever it is.
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I am able to monitor 3 different SENSE “orange” monitors or 3 different accounts at 3 different residences.
Two SENSE units are correctly updating the LABS Voltage charts (Power Quality Chart).
One SENSE unit (Account) is not updating the LABS Voltage chart and has not since March 30th, 2023.
Is there a SENSE Server down? Why would some users be affected and not others?
This issue has not been resolved and has continued now for 19 days. Thanks
I also created a ticket and linked this thread.
Sense Support wanted me to send a screenshot “so that we can analyze the issue”.
Curious how Sense India is responding to everyone else’s tickets?
Are they not allowed to view this forum?
Unless @JamesDrewAtSense or @JuliaAtSense steps in I’m guessing it will take another 2 weeks before India is allowed to create an internal ticket to engineering and at least a month before all the data is backfilled.
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i havnt even gotten a response from my bug submission yesterday
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For those new forum users who haven’t read this blog starting back in Nov 2022…
This is my old post. Same problem, same comments…
To the forum administrators: This issue has not been resolved. Please change the topic status from “SOLVED” to “STILL ACTIVE” on this blog. Thanks
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Hi all,
I just wanted to address this power quality issue.
This is an issue where some monitors/users are not updating the power quality data as quickly as many users expect. We are working on significantly improving this project, but it is still in process and not happening yet.
To provide some context on how we handle this issue:
If we have a very large or noticeable batch/majority / all of the users with failed power quality, it tends to mean something didn’t go through in the backend, and we work to fix it.
This tends to be a manual process that only a few people within this company can do, and it takes a significant amount of human bandwidth.
The next major section is when individual or non-related user monitors fail to update. This can be harder as it still requires significant time to investigate and resolve power quality here. This tends to be different as it does not relate to a batch failure or full-on outage and is what is happening now.
I am gathering each user who reports an outage of their power quality graphs that have not been updated within the last 72 hours. I then verify and keep count of them and report the number.
This can help create urgency for the need to resolve this issue and also makes it so I can make sure when we are working on getting this issue resolved, I can check back on the affected users and make sure that their individual issues are resolved.
Unfortunately, at this time, we can not immediately fill each user’s graph with the most recent data, and I do not have a timeline for exactly when this will be resolved.
The main reason for this is that the power quality feature is and never was a fully-fledged feature expected to work 100%. Instead, it is a Sense Labs feature which means it is experimental and can be unreliable or break from time to time. While we do not desire for this to happen, we know they are not perfect. The process is a lot less automated than one may expect, and a lot of work is put into it when there are issues, which is frequent.
Think of Sense Labs as a preview of what we are working on and a chance to try new features for yourself. However, I would be careful to rely on this feature until it is removed from labs and placed in the main section of the app.
Thanks for your understanding and patience, and don’t hesitate to keep the info coming so I can gather and report it.
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Hi @JamesDrewAtSense,
Thanks for the update and clarifications. What I’m taking away from your message are three key points.
- There are two types or modes of Power Quality batch process failures:
- Systemic outages that affect many users at one shot or perhaps even the whole user base. This is caused by the whole batch process going astray. Sense investigates and fixes these.
- User-specific failures that don’t seem to fit a pattern and require individual tracing and rerunning. Sense is not aiming to fix or rerun these one-offs at present (or possibly wait until enough accumulate, then attack them at one time ?)
- There’s no timeline right now to broadly fix the causes of these issues or to convert this part of Labs into a fully productized set of features.
- What you would like each affected user to do is to log their issue in the bug reporting mechanism here. You’ll use that for tracking and possible fixing ?
I think that’s a simple summary, right ?
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kinda hard to buy that labs was never intended to be production, its pushed in the marketing materials. But I do understand and would like to see things fixed.
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@danderson,
My take is that Sense has always had the strategy and desire to validate (or flush) new features via Sense Labs and also through structured betas. But just like all good tech products, the marketing has “extended out well ahead of their (R&D) skis”. I’m guessing that Sense’s new product offerings in the utility meter and panel spaces, likely vectored more R&D effort into scaling challenges, perhaps also forcing a rethink of some of the fundamental Sense infrastructure. I’m hoping that productization of Labs features are being considered as Sense looks to scale for utilities, etc.
Hi @kevin1 you worded it better than I. Thank you
What you said is mostly correct. For this specific point
-
- User-specific failures that don’t seem to fit a pattern and require individual tracing and rerunning. Sense is not aiming to fix or rerun these one-offs at present (or possibly wait until enough accumulate, then attack them at one time ?)
If we do fix these, we may just need to dedicate some time to it, so its better to do many of them all at once. I am not sure what the bandwidth is for this at the current moment. It may be on hold because if we can dedicate more time to fixing the system, this will be less necessary and could save time in the end. I really don’t have more info than that.
Thanks
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My take:
-Customers have great use for the Power Quality feature, highly value it and depend on it.
-Sense promotes and advertises the Power Quality feature, marketing the feature to potential customers.
-Sense acknowledges this feature is not fully developed, unreliable and expected to brake…
-There are multiple points of failure for this feature.
-A significant amount of time and resources are spent band-aid fixing the feature because it breaks so often.
-Sense has been working to improve this feature for a number of years but has nothing to show for it (yet).
-There is no timeline for completing this project feature.
-Huge marketing budget but too small of a technical/software/engineering budget.
-Lack of employees that can be dedicated to completing existing projects and fixing issues as they appear which will only be exacerbated as the customer base increases.
@JamesDrewAtSense I know your trying your best which certainty isn’t an easy task for one human. We really do appreciate you being the one person stepping up to the plate on top of things and keeping us informed.
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James: add me to the list of frozen PQ status since march 29
Thank you Danny I have noted this!
I have also been frozen since March 30. It became a significant issue late last night as I was working through a low voltage issue with the utility. 
Frozen since April 15
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How was your issue detected?:
Did you noticed any other signs of this issue around your home?:
Screenshots from Sense Lab
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Sense Labs graph screenshots
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Sense Labs notification Screenshots
I am getting No Data on the Power Quality. Is there something wrong in my home?
@cambrose1 , probably not your home. There’s a known issue with Power Quality in Sense Labs not updating. Because it is not a fully productized feature (that’s what the Labs part means), it’s currently done via batch process that is not as robust as the core real-time Sense App operation.
See explanation from Sense here:
ps: Moving this post to the Power Quality not updating thread.
Thank you!
No Power Quality updates from me since March 25