Very slow notifications?

[bubdog]

I just got my Arlo system and after upgrading to Smart Elite my notifications are extremely slow. It can take 30s to 1min30sec for a notification to happen after there is some motion or a person on my cameras. This obviously makes features like live view, 2 way audio, e911, and alarm pretty useless as I don't know something is happening until it is way too late for any of those things to be useful.

I know the issue is not with my internet service, I have 150mbit up and down fiber. The cameras were alerting almost instantly before I upgraded to Smart Elite.

Is there an issue with the Arlo service at the moment? When will this be resolved? Are other people experiencing this?

[jguerdat]

You don't specify whether the notifications are push or email. Push notifications should happen immediately while email has to wait for the video to completely upload so a link/thumbnail can be provided.

[TomMac]

As a PS to J above;

Pushes go out at the time of trigger event of camera

Emails go out after the file is done , so it's the record time + email time ( the longer your record session the longer the email takes )

[bubdog]

I should have specified, I'm talking about push notifications. I don't get a push notification on my phone for 30+ seconds after the motion is triggered. I have all email notifications turned off. This happens on both my phone and my wife's phone and my iPad.

It is definitely not sending the push notification at the time of triggering. It seems to do it maybe at the end of the recording? Or maybe just a random point in time 30+ seconds in the future?

[TomMac]

Try a simple reboot of the base via the power button  .... off - then on, let it reboot about 2 mins then test

[bubdog]

I rebooted the base station and waited for awhile. Doing that made it much worse. One camera does not notify or record at all and I cannot view it live despite seeing "full bars" on the signal strength indicator. The other one still takes 30s to 2min to send a push notification.

This is really buggy. Arlo needs to fix ASAP. What good are security cameras that don't work?

[bubdog]

OK I removed every device from my account. Took down all my cameras. Removed all the batteries. Factory reset the base station. Re added the base station and all of my cameras. No improvement. Push notifications take 30 seconds to 2 minutes to get to my phone making them pretty useless.

Ran an internet speed test to be sure, no issues there, 150+mbit up and down.

Something is very wrong with the Arlo firmware or cloud service. Status.arlo.com reports nothing wrong but I highly doubt that.

[jguerdat]

What happens if you're not on WiFi, just cell service?

[bubdog]

Same issue on wifi or cell service. Actually I have 3 devices (iPhone, iPad, and Galaxy s9+) signed in and they all receive the late notification at exactly the same time. When I trigger motion I can see the little person icon in the devices tab change to orange almost immediately. That indicates to me that the camera is detecting motion right away and passing the event to my phone but that the Arlo cloud service is delaying the sending of the push notification.

[bubdog]

This is still happening. Removed, factory reset, and re-paired the system again with no improvement.

In addition to this my cameras are silently failing for several hours at a time. They show as connected and charged in the app but it records no events, no cvr, and I can't use the live view.

[JamesC]

Given the number of issues you seem to be experiencing, I recommend opening a support case with the Arlo Support Team to further investigate the issue.

You will find several options for contacting support in the provided link: Arlo Support Team

JamesC

[bubdog]

@JamesC I have already done so for one issue but I am having so many! It takes over an hour to go through all of support's questions before they will escalate a case. I don't have time to do it for the multiple things going wrong right now. Here is a list:

1. Camera fails silently and randomly for hours at a time. Shows up as online in devices tab but is not recording events or cvr and cannot view live view.

2. Push notifications take 30+ seconds to be delivered (I have case #40387020 for this)

3. Recordings in library are corrupted, cannot tell what is going on

4. When CVR timeline gets to an event it skips to live view. Cannot view event footage in CVR.

5. Audio missing from library recordings (seems related to the corruption)

There are probably a few others I am forgetting. I have taken lots of troubleshooting steps including ruling out network/internet issues and un-pairing, factory resetting, and re-pairing my entire system. How do I go about creating cases for all of these issues?

I am feeling very frustrated with Arlo at the moment. An expensive system should not have so many issues. I am more than willing to help debug but I feel as though nobody from Arlo (or Arlo support) is willing to acknowledge my problems and work with me to resolve them. Support always just asks me to do the same troubleshooting steps I have already done over again. There is quite obviously something wrong with the Arlo cloud service right now and I wish Arlo would just tell us what is going on and what is being done to fix it.

[Prolixium]

Hi - 

I'm having the same problem as you've described in your first message.  The push notifications take 50-60 seconds (anecdotal) now whereas in the past they would be more-or-less instantaneous.  The only difference between my story and yours is that my notification delays just started yesterday morning (2018-09-01).  I've rebooted my base stations but that didn't help.

Phone is Android and it happens on Wi-Fi and LTE.  I've done no Arlo app or OS upgrades on the phone in the last few days (app is up-to-date: 2.5.3_22376).  My home Internet connection is humming along smoothly, no changes there.

I've got 3x base stations & 8x cameras on the Smart Premier plan, which I had long before the "smart" features were added to it.

- Mark

[Prolixium]

To follow up with my previous message.. I just noticed an interesting datapoint.

The upstream router from my Arlo base stations is a Linux box, so I went ahead and ran tcpdump on it filtering out traffic from one of the Arlo base stations (MAC & proto 6).  Other than the periodic hearbeat traffic to the Arlo Cloud (read: AWS), it was idle.

While carrying my laptop and phone, I walked in front of one of the Arlo cameras I have indoors (in a dark area w/motion detection enabled) and immediately heard the IR filter "click" of the camera and at almost the same time (~1 second later?) saw a spike in traffic from the base station to Arlo Cloud.

After about 30-40 seconds, then I got the push notification on my phone.

It's not very scientific, but it does appear that the delay here is due to processing in the cloud.  Everything on-prem seems to be responding as expected.

HTH.

- Mark

[jguerdat]

I turned notifications on one camera to test (it's a Pro, I think, might be a P2 butI'm too lazy to check right now) and notifications are not instantaneous but happen wihin 10 seconds or so.

[ralfyguy1]

Never works right for me either. It's like playing lottery. Most unreliable notifications system ever created by man.

[ralfyguy1]

So I took all  cameras out of the Arlo Smart zone and notifications are INSTANT from EACH camera again. Shows right there that Arlo Smart is as buggy as it's gonna get.

Now the big question: There is NO option to put the cameras back IN the Arlo Smart zone anymore!

[jguerdat]

Just removed a camera from Smart, saved, and moved the camera back (Drop Here to Activate) with no problems.

My Smart notifications are typically 10-20 seconds after detection. That's likely due to the need for server-side processing to determine if the motion was by a person or other. It's not in the camera - it's the AI processing done on the server.

[ralfyguy1]

When I remoed all of them, I had to use the app to add them back. In the browser it was not possible. My notifications are totally random ranging from 30 seconds to 0 minutes later or none at all. Toast popups with vibration are almost instant but it does not always play a sound. When moved out of Arlo Smart everything works correctly, just no smart detection of course.

[Prolixium]

Disabling[0] Arlo Smart on all of my cameras has fixed the notification delays for me, too.  In my experience, this all worked fine for the first few months after launch of the Smart feature but only in the last week did I notice that notifications have been delayed (maybe they have been sporadically delayed for much longer but I didn't notice).

I'm speculating that there are more folks paying for the Smart Premier now and their cloud services aren't scaled appropriately to handle the increased load.  I did notice that notifications were delayed much longer during the day vs. in the middle of the night (Pacific time), which sounds load-related.

I'll flip it back on in a few weeks to see if anything has changed, I suppose.  I only have the Smart Premier to get support for more than 5 cameras.

[0] There's a showstopper bug on the Android app that I kept hitting when dragging cameras to the bottom of the screen to disable Arlo Smart.  I had to use an iPhone to do it.  It looks like it only affects folks who have more than 6 cameras (I had to drag the last 2 cameras down pretty far past the other 6 that are disabled already, which is when the app crashes).

[jguerdat]

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@ralfyguy1 wrote:

When I remoed all of them, I had to use the app to add them back. In the browser it was not possible.

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FWIW, I was using a browser (Chrome in W10) to delete and re-add the cameras from Smart.

[ralfyguy1]

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@jguerdat wrote:

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@ralfyguy1 wrote:

When I remoed all of them, I had to use the app to add them back. In the browser it was not possible.

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FWIW, I was using a browser (Chrome in W10) to delete and re-add the cameras from Smart.

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I use the same browser and OS, and after I remove all 9 cameras, there is none listed anymore to add them back in. I had to use tha app to add them all back. This is only if I remove ALL of them.

Notifications started getting delayed from 30 seconds to 30 minutes right after I added the cameras back in. Without Arlo Smart every notification is instant, just for motion or audio detection of course.

[jguerdat]

Open a case with support here so the issue is documented.

[jguerdat]

BTW, I verified your observation. After removing all cameras from Smart, the browser won't allow and cameras to be added since there's no camera even listed. Using the app works fine.

@JamesC?

[dhiller0217]

Agreed on the problems stated here!  I've had the Arlo system for nearly two years.  I've been using 5 Arlo Pro cameras the whole time, and everything has been decent at best.  The cameras themselves are nice, but the APP has caused me the most frustration, and the APP is vital to this system.  There have been versions which have worked great, and others which have been nearly useless. The current app with Arlo Smart incorporated has been the absolute worst so far.

Long story short, I got tired of my driveway camera dying constantly from too much activity, so I decided to add a 6th camera yesterday, which is an Arlo Pro 2, and I'm going to give it A/C power soon.  I needed the ability to add this 6th camera to my subscription, so I did the Arlo Smart Premier trial with intent to pay for the yearly upgrade.  I am having zero success with reliable push notifications now.  I wasted 4 or 5 hours troubleshooting yesterday, hard reset my system, and resynced every camera I have.  They either don't show up at all on my Android Galaxy S7, which I also upgraded to Oreo yesterday as well, or they show up late, and when they do show up, I am getting notifications for cameras which aren't even triggered for push notifications in my modes.  Example - Rule#1 is set for when Camera 1 detects motion, to record video on Camera 1 as well as Camera 2. That rule is supposed to provide a push notification.  No other rules have Camera 2 set to even detect motion or give notifications.  When Camera 1 detects motion for Rule#1, IF I get a push notification, which is about 1 out of 10 times at best, I get lockscreen popups that Camera 2 has detected a person or motion.  What's the deal with that?  And I can't even scroll down on the lockscreen notification to see the video snapshot.

Arlo Smart needs these bugs worked out, and it needs to work more seamlessly with the modes, unless I just completely don't understand its purpose.  Most importantly, I just want my notifications to come in promptly and tell me which camera they have been detected on.  That is the single most important feature for this whole system minus every other bell and whistle and patched in "new feature" that Arlo has gone through.  These systems are WAAAY to expensive to cause such a vast amount of people these types of consistent frustrations.