Go to: signalcend.com/check — pick your device, check your symptoms, get an estimated monthly conflict count and a shareable report. Free, 30 seconds, no signup.
Here's what it's actually measuring and why the number is higher than you'd expect.
The problem in one paragraph
Every connected device sends state change events. Your hub or platform receives them and decides what's true. The problem: events don't always arrive in the order they were sent. A reconnect packet arrives before the disconnect packet. A timestamp is inverted because of clock drift. A -89 dBm reading fires a state change that's actually a transmission artifact.
Most stacks pick the last-arrived event as ground truth. That's wrong a surprisingly large percentage of the time.
The architecture gap
There's a layer missing from most IoT stacks. Not monitoring. Not alerting. The layer between raw device events and application decisions — the layer that asks:
Is this event's timestamp trustworthy?
Is this offline event actually a late-arriving disconnect that should be overridden?
Is this sensor reading from a signal strong enough to trust?
Did this event arrive in the right order relative to the previous event?
That layer is called state arbitration. Most consumer platforms don't have it. Most industrial stacks implement it badly. Almost nobody has it at the infrastructure level where it belongs.
What the API response looks like
When a device fires an offline event inside a reconnect window, here's what you get back:
json{
"resolved_state": {
"authoritative_status": "online",
"confidence": 0.92,
"recommended_action": "ACT",
"arbitration_method": "race_condition_resolution",
"race_condition_resolved": true,
"conflicts_detected": [
"Offline event timestamp 2.3s before resolution — late-arriving disconnect identified, superseded by previously processed reconnect. Device continuity confirmed."
],
"resolution_basis": {
"timestamp_confidence": "high",
"signal_quality": "moderate",
"conflicts_resolved": 1
}
}
}
47ms. Full trace. The ghost alert never fires.
The diagnostic tool
I wanted a way for non-technical users to understand this problem, so I built signalcend.com/check — a free diagnostic that estimates your monthly state conflict count based on your platform and symptoms.
The score is based on real production data from 1.3M resolution events across four manufacturing plants. Not exact — but directionally accurate.
Most smart home users get numbers in the hundreds. Heavy IoT users get numbers in the thousands.
After you get your score you can share it directly or forward it to your device manufacturer with one click. The email is pre-written. You just hit send.
The API
signalcend.com — 1,000 free resolutions, no card, production endpoint.
POST your device state, get back ground truth. Python and JavaScript SDKs available.
Full API reference on the site.
Happy to answer questions about the implementation, the arbitration algorithm, or the case study methodology in the comments.
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