Empty Gateway Time string from HTTP Integration

Never seen this before, two pings with no Time info

HTTP Integration sends an empty time string:


  • A glitch ?
  • Someone trying dev code in V2 ?
  • My gateway is dying?

I know this problem from my data of TTNmon. Some gateways seem to send no valid timestamp. I also found gateways which differed a few minutes from the packet time added by the TTN backend.
I have gateways sending no timestamp all the time and also gateways which send sometimes no timestamp. This is true for legacy as well as the TTN forwarder based gateways.

I performed a quick search on my database. It has stored packets of 405 unique gateways. 151 of them sent at least once no timestamp. The gateway eui-af5ee01293673410 received 5433 packets in total. Only a single packet had no timestamp.

It seems to be normal to happen. However it would be nice to know why it happens. How does your gateway perform the timesync? Are you using GPS?

Standard TTN Gateway, no GPS

As you traced, it also happens with other Gateways my 3 (standard TTN) Nodes passes
I just had not looked at my database values in this detail before.

Happened 44 times on 135000 pings (from 3 TTN Nodes),
on 3 different Gateways out of 8 unique Gateways (my Nodes have seen in the past month)

Although statistically you can’t conclude anything;
the standard TTN Sketch Node had 22 (50%) of those empty times.
The remaining 22 empty time entries where shared by my other 2 Nodes with a Cayenne sketch
(I have an HTTP integration on two TTN Applications going into the same MySQL database)

Conclusion:

Have added code to ignore empty time string values
Now I understand why my graphs sometimes gave weird results (on the Time axis)