Case Study: SmartThings achieves rapid detection and triage of OTA firmware failures with Sumo Logic

SmartThings - Customer Case Study

SmartThings, a connected-home platform, was building over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates for Zigbee devices and faced many potential failure points — the cloud platform, user hubs, devices, power loss, and RF interference. Their services run across multiple AWS regions, shards, and EC2-based JVM clusters, so the main challenge was reliably detecting where updates failed and implementing effective recovery and troubleshooting.

SmartThings instrumented their stack with key-value logging and a correlation ID passed between systems, then used Sumo Logic to aggregate logs, parse fields (hub, device, status, firmware) and build searches, dashboards and transactions that trace each update from cloud to device and back. That visibility lets engineers drill into specific EC2 instances and surface WARN/ERRORs (e.g., ElastiCache timeouts or RDS issues), dramatically improving triage speed and confidence in the OTA feature, which is now in testing prior to full production rollout.

SmartThings