C-Touch network monitoring

You can't monitor a remote network unless you POLL it.

And polling is bad.

C-Gate does it when used with SchedulePlus, and so on, but it is very careful to throttle the amount, and to only do it during bus idle times.

The smaller embedded devices don't have the computer power to do all that clever dickery.

 

What does "available" mean?

This is where it gets hard.

On cbus, if there is power and a clock generator on the bus, it's available. The device you are interested in might not be (it might be unplugged, or [unlikely] malfunctioning). The only way to find out is to poll that device and retrieve some status information from it.

So, which device to poll?

One, all, some subset? Under what circumstances do you deem a failure? A lack of lighting group traffic (but that might be legit)? A unit missing? But how many? Maybe the unit is meant to be missing for maintenance?

The circumstances and scenario can vary wildly, a one-does-all approach won't work because it makes one user happy and pisses off everybody else.

As an aside:
One of the constant bollockings CIS gets is that C-Gate reports networks in error when they are not. C-Gate uses a fairly anal approach: if a unit won't talk to it, there is an error. Sometimes, poor wiring practices mean that things seem to work (by virtue of lots of retries), but cgate is able to detect and report that fault condition. Then WE GET TOLD to make cgate less sensitive because "the site works". It might be dodgy, but nobody wants to go fiddling wiring.

The approach used by cgate is thorough - it walks the networks.

Anything less thorough is going to be extremely error prone.

Summary: without an extremely precise specification of what is meant by "available", this is an impossible task. And with a precise specification, it's most likely either an impossible task, or an unrealistic task.

Unless you just mean "tell me if the network on the other side of the bridge has no power". That might be possible (one day) but the better way to do that would be with specific firmware support in the bridge.