Indigo Domotics

I am monitoring several weather stations but from time to time one of them fails and stops reporting for hours to days.

The WU plugin monitors the custom state "Current Observation Time" for each weather station device, which no longer updates if the station is not reporting. This is the only indication I have that the station has troubles (besides going to the WU website).

Could we setup a trigger notification in the plugin that notifies me when a station has not been updated for a certain number of hours?

I've set up a 20-minute timer. A trigger restarts the timer whenever the observation time changes, and another trigger sends a Pushover message to my phone if the timer ever expires.

This is definitely an issue when monitoring PWS locations. The two that are closest to me are both inconsistent and one of them has been offline since the 20th of January (I'm skeptical that it's coming back). To be honest, I never really thought about a notification option like this. It's a great idea.

I'll think about the best way to implement something, but in the interim, I think @racarter's approach is a good one.

Dave

I think I have this knocked. I just want to do some testing and think about whether my approach is the best one.



Stay tuned.
Dave

What I have seems to be working well, but I encountered an issue that I didn't anticipate. When Weather Underground has a non-reporting PWS (for example), it can still send a partially-valid data set which will belie its true "on-line" status. For example, I have a PWS site that's been offline since late January, yet WU sends data that says that the last successful update was minutes ago. The bottom line is that it's going to be a little bit more complicated to tell if a site is actually offline and will involve a bit more complex criteria.

(This all applies to the manner in which the trigger gets fired, not the fundamental operation of the plugin.)