Events that fail to route to Thingspeak marked as successfully routed

[ChronovaEngineering]

Hi all,

I’ve just come across another Thingspeak routing-related bug. A number of events from one of my devices show up in Notehub as “successfully routed” but when I check the Route Log, the Thingspeak response is empty. The associated entry is also missing from my Thingspeak dashboard.

When I manually re-route the event it is successfully received by Thingspeak and the response field is filled. It also shows up on Thingspeak where it was missing before.

(I didn’t change any of the JSON formatting or route settings, I just clicked the “route event” button.)

Some context:
The device that transmitted this batch of events was deployed in a location with very poor wireless signal and had been offline for several months before managing to re-establish a connection. When it came back online, it sent around 6000 notes over 4 connection periods.

A second, possibly related oddity I noticed is that on the 20th May, it looks like a patch was pushed to the Notecard, which then caused the device to go a bit haywire. Before the patch, sensor readings were being taken every 15 minutes, as intended. Afterwards, the device started creating notes non-stop until it fell off the grid again.

The same event had the same effect on another of my devices on the 10th May, until it sorted itself out ~2600 notes later.

Side note:
In the device’s “Usage” page, 7624 routed events have been logged but the Thingspeak channel they have been routed to only contains 4563 entries. I’m not sure if re-routing the failed events is counted towards the usage but it looks like the un-routed events definitely have been counted.

TLDR:
I’m not sure where to go from here, but I guess there are 3 things I’m bringing up:

1. Some event routings to Thingspeak are failing but getting logged as “successful” and consuming credits.

2. In certain circumstances, patches seem to be causing odd device behaviors, including generating an absurd quantity of note files.

3. These combined issues put quite a dent in my credit balance, so is there any chance the wasted credits could be refunded to my account?

Thanks in advance!
~Hazel

[RobLauer]

Hi @ChronovaEngineering,

Some event routings to Thingspeak are failing but getting logged as “successful” and consuming credits.

We looked into these routing attempts and it looks like this could be an issue with ThingSpeak. On the problem routes they returned a 200 response (which indicates an “OK”) with a 0 in the body. To Notehub, this looks like a success, as it should be. If I were you, I would check with ThingSpeak to identify any service issues or outages and see if those align with the timeframes in question.

In certain circumstances, patches seem to be causing odd device behaviors, including generating an absurd quantity of note files.

Notehub will never proactively push anything to the Notecard that you didn’t authorize. We don’t do firmware updates automatically or anything like that. The _session.qo Notefiles for instance are created when a new session is started with Notehub. You’re not charged for these unless you route them out to another cloud app.

These combined issues put quite a dent in my credit balance, so is there any chance the wasted credits could be refunded to my account?

Yes, if the issue is an outage or bug on the Notehub side. Again, we don’t see anything in the logs that points to this being a Notehub issue, but please let us know if you uncover anything with ThingSpeak so we can continue to debug this with you.