How to monitor Zigbee devices for dead or alive, especially end devices that sleep

RE: How to monitor Zigbee devices for dead or alive, especially end devices that sleep

Elfving — Wed, 09 Apr 2025 12:26:20 GMT

The ZED aging and keep-alive should technically take care of this (chapter "End Device Aging and Management" in the Zigbee spec). When the device times out, it should be removed from the neighbor table, so the neighbor table of the parent device is the best indication that a device is no longer on the network.

You could also check the age or time to expire fields of the neighbor table locally on the parent. Here is a function for how this could be retrieved (it is made for nRF5 SDK, though it should be somewhat similar in NCS).

Other than that, I guess the only option would be to regularly send commands to the ZED and keep a sort of manual neighbor table, but that seems unnecessary when there already is something for this exact thing.

Regards,

Elfving

RE: How to monitor Zigbee devices for dead or alive, especially end devices that sleep

masayuki_i — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 23:43:52 GMT

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

It is not a sniffer that I am looking for. I simply want to know how to check if the device is able to participate in the network (i.e., if it is ready to communicate) from a coordinator.
I thought about using the zdo mgmt_lqi command of Zigbee shell to periodically check the LQI, but the table obtained by this command is not reflected in real time (we found that resetting a connected device does not remove the device's information from the table, the LQI is not set to 0, etc.), so we decided that it would be difficult to use this command for periodic communication status checks.

RE: How to monitor Zigbee devices for dead or alive, especially end devices that sleep

Elfving — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 10:33:27 GMT

Hi,

Are you looking for something like a Zigbee sniffer, that perhaps also gathers logs from the devices in the network?

Regards,

Elfving