We have a about 50 Electrons deployed in the field and they generate a packet every 15 seconds and send it to the particle cloud where we then use an integration to further send the data to a custom storage and charting program. These units all transmit the same data like clock work and for well over a year they have worked very well. We have had these set to a 50MB plan for over a year with no issues.
Suddenly, yesterday, I have noticed that 5-6 of the units are now transmitting FAR more data than normal. Yesterday I had to upgrade them to 100MB and today they are “running out of data again”
We have made no firmware changes to these devices and operationally, I see nothing different in the data they transmit or any change in the data that is being received in the integration, yet the data rate being charted by the sim is SIGNIFICANTLY higher!!
Particle recently implemented our change to the platform to correct a billing oversight. This oversight resulted in a number of SIMs not being paused at their data cap as well as not being billed for excess data consumption. Your account was identified as one of the accounts impacted by this and you should have received an email on July 31st with more information on this.
If you still have concerns regarding your device behavior or recent bills, I encourage you to file a ticket with us at our support portal and we’ll be happy to perform a deeper dive.
This is NOT that. Please look at the data in the devices in my account. All the devices by design should be using the SAME amount of data, clocked every 15 sec. some of the devices are recording far more data now at the cellular level, but that increase is not being reflected at the integration.
Data usage can differ due to many various factors. In addition to messages sent to your infrastructure, data usage can include authentication payloads, retried messages, or new session negotiations. Connectivity quality can lead to data consumption variance.
When reviewing data consumption among your devices, variances were acknowledged on daily consumption. It's possible that your data usage appears higher than normal as a result of our cloud incident on July 15th.
I will be happy to more personally review this in depth next week and work with you more closely in your filed ticket.
Particle's support staff was unavailable on Friday and typically do not work weekends. I do promise that your ticket will be addressed at the team's earliest availability.
This variance was extreme on about 10 devices and then just as abruptly cut off today and went back to normal, but there is a point for 2 1/2 days where the data rate was easily 10X normal.
This was not a normal occurrence and yes I am aware of the issue you had last month, but that should have just brought us up to between 35 and 40 MB - NOT over 100 in one day!!
This is still very much a problem, bordering on emergency levels for us. A ticket was submitted, but no one from particle has responded yet. This issue is only affecting a few of our units, but I have had to raise the sim to 200 MB in many cases which means the units are chugging through over 4X as much data as they have in any month over the last year. We have made no changes to our program, firmware or operations.