Why does the Core3 report back constantly to events.split.io?

[416to305]

I installed pihole and my Core3 is reporting back to this address every 5 seconds multiple times:

When I search online, it says on the split.io website that they: Record events that measure your customer behavior across your application including clicks, views, checkout events, page load times, or any event that measures your customer experience.

What does that have to do with the Core3 controller?  I've blocked it obviously, but why is it reporting to some random site multiple times every 5 seconds?  There's literally NO reason that anything needs to report back that frequently.

Really annoying to be honest finding this after using Control4 for a year.  

[SpencerT]

Looks to be briefly discussed in this post..

[LollerAgent]

Split.io is a SaaS company that handles feature flagging.  I'm sure C4 is using it to gradually test or roll out features -- although it is a tiny bit odd that the system(s) are designed in such a way that the end user device (the controller) is making these requests and not C4's own backend systems.  I don't totally understand the C4 architecture though.

[cwilmo]

Like said by others Split.io is a A/B testing tool with feature flag. Basically the idea is to toggle on and off some features, roll them out to some subset of users, and so on.  It makes sense to that the requests are originating from the client side (controller).  When blocked you are probably just seeing the default application behavior.  Split’s free version only includes feature flagging and not metrics.  It has been mentioned by others elsewhere that to block user monitoring you can block https://cdn.split.io/rum-agent/ instead.  I run another DNS sinkhole and my controller only polls about every 5 minutes to events.split.io which are blocked (I have auth and events blocked but sdk allowed - using Hagezi Light). I have noticed no performance degradation or lacking features but intend to try and whitelist it to see what happens.  It it still bothers you, you might want to ask on something like the Hagezi discord or C4 discord.

[Darin, PM C4 CX Platform]

4 hours ago, LollerAgent said:

Split.io is a SaaS company that handles feature flagging.  I'm sure C4 is using it to gradually test or roll out features -- although it is a tiny bit odd that the system(s) are designed in such a way that the end user device (the controller) is making these requests and not C4's own backend systems.  I don't totally understand the C4 architecture though.

LollerAgent is 100% correct, we added Split.io into the Control4 platform and applications back around 2019 when we moved to more modern software development and deployment processes. The frequency of polling was actually something we disliked about Split.io and earlier this year we moved off Split.io to Launch Darkly.  So I'm surprised to see a Core controller still talking to Split.io. @416to305 I've sent you a DM for some system info, so I can have an engineer take a look at what is going on.

I believe pi hole devices block communication to both Split.io and Launch Darkly, so you may want to consider whitelisting Launch Darkly to receive new features as they become available. 

pihole -w launchdarkly.com clientstream.launchdarkly.com stream.launchdarkly.com clientsdk.launchdarkly.com sdk.launchdarkly.com app.launchdarkly.com events.launchdarkly.com mobile.launchdarkly.com

 

[Pato]

Hello,

Co-founder and CTO of Split.io here.

What you are seeing is posting of telemetry. Much needed to understand how feature flags are performing among other things.

You can change that to the frequency of your choice. 

We no longer use polling for fetching feature flags but streaming if that is what you are referring to.

[416to305]

Well I'm glad I banned it because it's the #2 noisiest device on my network right after scribe.logs.roku.com.  events.split.io and auth.split.io are non-stop being contacted.  In the last 24 hours there have been 1152 blocked requests to events.split.io and 96 to auth.split.io.  I've blocked it so not a big deal but just wanted to post here in case anyone was unaware how frequently their Control4 system is reporting in on them and tracking what they do.

This is directly from the split.io website as posted earlier: "Record events that measure your customer behavior across your application including clicks, views, checkout events, page load times, or any event that measures your customer experience."  So, while you can say it's used to track feature flags, that doesn't change the fact that your own website states otherwise.  There's absolutely no reason that it needs to contact your servers every 30 seconds to track "feature flags."

Very disappointing and not something I'd have expected considering the high cost that Control4 was to implement.  This is something I'd expect to see on Smartthings or another consumer/budget device.  

"You can change that to the frequency of your choice." - I am waiting for my Dealer to get back to me and confirm they have changed it / removed it.

[DanITman]

5 hours ago, 416to305 said:

Well I'm glad I banned it because it's the #2 noisiest device on my network right after scribe.logs.roku.com.  events.split.io and auth.split.io are non-stop being contacted.  In the last 24 hours there have been 1152 blocked requests to events.split.io and 96 to auth.split.io.  I've blocked it so not a big deal but just wanted to post here in case anyone was unaware how frequently their Control4 system is reporting in on them and tracking what they do.

This is directly from the split.io website as posted earlier: "Record events that measure your customer behavior across your application including clicks, views, checkout events, page load times, or any event that measures your customer experience."  So, while you can say it's used to track feature flags, that doesn't change the fact that your own website states otherwise.  There's absolutely no reason that it needs to contact your servers every 30 seconds to track "feature flags."

Very disappointing and not something I'd have expected considering the high cost that Control4 was to implement.  This is something I'd expect to see on Smartthings or another consumer/budget device.  

"You can change that to the frequency of your choice." - I am waiting for my Dealer to get back to me and confirm they have changed it / removed it.

Block splits.io used to break features in Control4.  Things would stop working if you blocked it.  I know that custom buttons on the neeo would not function if you were blocking the split.io on pihole.