Alerting Mechanism for Base Station / Camera Offline

[Richard-65]

Our installation will be very remote beach house. There is a need for mains failure detection in case intruder has deliberately switched of the power. This would be a nice sofware update feature.

[mb23]

We have been asking for this flaw to be resolved since 2015 https://community.arlo.com/t5/Arlo-Idea-Exchange/Alerting-Mechanism-for-Base-Station-Camera-Offline/...

WOW!!!! it has been 4 years. One would think that it's not that hard to implement. I guess product managers don't believe it's that important.   

[TheWolk]

The ask is to have a timely push notification and /or email alert (based on configuration) if there is a communication problem between arlo base station and cloud services regardless of a reason, which could be:
1. Power outage.
2. ISP related issues.
3. User equipment tampering.
4. User equipment failure.

[MarkC]

Beyond unbelievable to be honest! Since this request there have been 3 camera upgrades, soft features that are really not that necessary and important on battery based cameras, oh and ones we have to pay for! They are more than happy to take more money from people yet still not bothered to deliver a feature that should have been there from the start! The server knows the battery level of the cameras, it knows if the base is connected or not so rather than charging us to see if it was the neighbours dog 'George' or the UPS guy who left a package on your doorstep how about charging us to see if system is actually all online and working correctly!!! This I would be more than happy to pay for (not that I should though right!). Am totally at a loss here!

[Paul_FCCL]

Obviously NOT a priority for Arlo, that is correct: “3 new cameras have been introduced since this was first suggested”. It doesn’t seem to be too seriously taken by Arlo, too busy pushing out more products.

New stuff makes money, fixing or improving old stuff does not. That has to be the reason for Arlo to keep ignoring the issue.

[MarkC]

Exactly my point, however the biggest issue here from the start is that they marketed it as a secority/monitoring system to watch over your home or small business yet it lacks the basic feature of actually informing the user if it is NOT working.

So no news is good news, your home is safe right! Nope! The system stopped responding 3 days ago, thieves took down 3 cameras last night to come back tonight to clean you out but all is well because Alrlo will let you know that there is an issue right!

I am not being funny but one of the first things I would incorporate into any system like this is the ability to notify the user of an issue yet YEARS down the line it is still missing despite several threads and requests to add it!

Beyond contempt IMHO  

[eddyj]

You've got to wonder why it hasn't been done yet. It is a blindingly obvious need, and it can't be that hard (generally speaking). Maybe there is something else going on that makes them not want to send the notifications out. I would suspect (pure speculation on my part) that it is something like the base stations going off-line all the time, without anyone noticing, which would suddenly become very ovbious if they told you every time they happened. Otherwise, it is incomprehensible why this feature is still missing.

[rlorenzo]

Is there an API or someway for us to build our own method of polling the Arlo camera automatically so we can write our own alerts is the cameras are down?

[MarkC]

Yes there is. I use Smartthings and the cameras integrate into it okish. There are 'smartapps' which notify me of the battery level and availability etc. So I believe the API is open, do not have the details but check out the Smartthings Community and the user developed 'drivers' and 'Smartapps'. Should hold enough details... However point is that it should be integrated into the system without having to use alternative methods...

[TheWolk]

As much as I hate to say this, it is likely that the "System Down" notification is not getting implemented due to concern about potential increase of the call volume to support center it may (and most probably will) cause once put in place. Maybe this aspect can be handled by proper messaging to end user with good explanation on why the alert got triggered and what to check when this happens?

[bobbybrown79997]

I had this happen the other day again. The cleaning person unplugged it and then plugged it back in but for some reason, it didn't reconnect to the system again. It was offline for 3 days before I noticed it. All I needed to do is unplug it and plug it back in and then it worked. When I finally log into the system it shows me it's disconnected but they cannot send me an alert or email when it does? I think EDDYJ is correct. They have a faulty system and people would be getting alerts all the time because they are going offline more than we know.