Handling fitbit outages

[raj_optum]

COuld you please help us in getting the fitbit outage stats?

DO we have any service for getting outage start time and end time?

If fitbit API goes down , can you guys send anykind of notifications to the client applications?

Also we are using subscriptions API to get notified. WIll you be sending all the missed notifications ,once fitbit API comes back after the outage.

Thanks,

Raj

[AndrewFitbit]

@raj_optum We have a status page: Fitbit Status

If an outage does occur, we typically will acknowledge it on the forums.

For your subscription question, you can find the answer here: API Docs - subscriptions

[JordanDev]

@AndrewFitbit - it isn't clear in the documentation what the Fitbit does if there is a Fitbit outage in regard to subscription notifications.

Example:

Notifications from Fitbit cease for 3 hours because of a Fitbit outage.

Upon recovery, does Fitbit automatically send the "missed" notifications for those three hours, or is it it the responsibility of the developer to request the data for that time period?

thanks!

Jordan

[AndrewFitbit]

Hi @JordanDev, the section in the docs that I linked says this:

"The Subscriptions API does not attempt to send a notification more than once."

Which means if a notification is missed for whatever reason (outage, app unavailable, etc.), it will not attempt to send it again.

[JeremiahFitbit]

Please see the section on resiliency regarding Subscriptions API notifications.

[JordanDev]

@AndrewFitbit @JeremiahFitbit -

Apologies - but I'm still confused about how to make sure there is no gap in my data should there be a Fitbit outage. The documentation says, "your application must fetch the most recent resources to be certain that the best data is presented." But if there is an outage, will the most recent resource include all the user data that was gathered during the outage? My concern is I would only be given a chunk of that user data instead of the whole thing. 

Expanding on my example above...let's say there is a Fitbit outage that spans two days. On Day 2 Fitbit is back up and I get a notification that there is new activites data. Given there was an outage I never received a notification for data for Day 1 of the outage. Because of this, is it up to me to make a manual request (not driven by notification) to request activities data for Day 1 of the outage?

[JeremiahFitbit]

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JordanDev wrote: Because of this, is it up to me to make a manual request (not driven by notification) to request activities data for Day 1 of the outage?

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Correct. Your application should also have a way to manually retrieve data. You should rely on the Subscriptions API, but have a way to fetch data for all users on a particular day independent of receiving a Subscriptions API notification in the event the Subscriptions API or your application experience downtime.

[raj_optum]

@AndrewFitbit @JeremiahFitbit ,

I think it would help the consumers/developers more, if you send us the missed notifications.

If that is not possible from your end, Atleast you have to give the option to  developers  to fetch the data based on the timestamp instead of getting the data for complete day.

please let us know your comments.

Thanks,

Raj

[JeremiahFitbit]

@raj_optum: The Fitbit Subscriptions API only supports day-level notifications, so fetching a complete day is reasonable thing to do.