sporadic no Arlo smart notifications or recordings in library starting December 26 - case #41359733

[n1976jmk]

Good morning all, unfortunately I am also starting to have issues again. The issue is not happening all the time but it has started around December 26 for me.  I won't receive any smart notifications from motion triggered within our activity zones where it normally works completely fine. Example, on December 26 an Amazon delivery person walked down my driveway to put a package at my backdoor but I did not receive any smart notifications from the driveway camera when they were walking down the driveway to deliver it or when they left (I should have received two person notifications).  On a second example, last night someone came to our front door where we always receive a person smart notification from our front yard camera did not receive any smart notification or no recording in the library.

I have opened case #41359733 today, emailed Mark from L3 Arlo support who helped me a few weeks ago with beta testing the new base station and camera firmware and tweeted a direct message to the Arlo CEO Mark a well all this morning in hopes of raising awareness to resolve sooner than later.

Lastly, I believe more Arlo camera owners out there are having issues but just are not noticing it because it is sporadic for me.  So if Arlo owners are not paying 100% attention they may not notice they are not receiving all the notifications and recordings missing from the libraries.  Lastly, I believe I read someone else posted on this forum their issues started occurring on December 25 and they stopped receiving all notifications and nothing is being recorded in their library :(.

@JamesC could you please make sure your connections at Arlo are aware please.

thank you all,

[n1976jmk]

Hi Findonsa,

Thanks for confirming myself the others on this thread aren’t the only ones having the same issues.

Can you also open a case so you and Arlo can track that more people are noticing the issue? You can open a case via the support website via a form to fill out vs. talking to overseas support for an hour who follow a book of questions to ask.

Thanks Find!!!

[n1976jmk]

Hi @Mjbeuke,

I hope support ramps up starting today too!!!

I’ve been emailing Mark V exact dates, times, camera details, where the motion event is on SD card but not in my cloud library.

[n1976jmk]

@Mark-V 

@JamesC 

With the holidays over, can you please resume troubleshooting and if some could please be so very kind to provide a short brief update it would be 110% appreciated.  Thank you as always!

[n1976jmk]

Hi and good morning, @Mark-V 

Here is another customer to request times when it recorded to the SD card but not the cloud.

thank you!!!

[n1976jmk]

Hi BigCitynl, I have been experiencing the same but the delays have seem to subsided as of yesterday for me.  If you look in the Arlo ultra camera forum there are many threads of complaints with sporadically failing to detect motion.  The motion event will be recorded to the SD card but not to the cloud and people do not receive smart notifications.

I dislike very much how some Arlo employees and gurus reply to threads on these forums like no one is having issues.  Anyone can clearly see there is issues with sporadic and missing cloud recordings and smart notifications since there are dozens of the same threads and replies but all sorts of users, not just one or two.  But for whatever they do not acknowledge and instead ask people to adjust there systems which have been working fine until something broke on Arlo's end.

Arlo needs more transparency to their customers and fan base.  We are owed that for the amount of money we invested in there company.

Instead of asking us to re-check our motion settings or reboot the base station for the 100th time.  Try putting a sticky post on the forums for everyone to see of the current issues.  It would save everyone a lot of time.

Example:

Make a 'sticky' post that would always stay at the top of the forums to show 'here are our current known issues that Arlo is troubleshooting'

1 - sporadic missing cloud recordings

2 - sporadic smart notifications mixing up vehicles for person notifications.  And animal notifications for people.

Put a date and time the issues started occurring and what the high level approximate date of resolve will be.

Then have the Arlo employees update that thread daily with the latest status.

thanks for listening everyone!

@JamesC 

[ej28405]

The sticky post is a great idea.  I am still seeing the same issues many others are reporting on this forum. At minimum it would be nice to have some (or any) response from an official Arlo team member addressing all of these issues. It is extremely frustrating to spend hundreds or in some cases thousands of dollars on something like this to not have it work correctly and not have any response from the vendor. Hopefully something will be communicated soon since it is now after the holidays. For now I am waiting patiently but that is beginning to run thin. 

[ej28405]

@Mark-V 

@JamesC 

Status updates would very much be appreciated. I am seeing responses to other threads addressing other issues but not the one that seems to be impacting the most people based on customer feedback on this forum. 

[Arloultra]

Just noticed today I'm showing a recording locally but it's not duplicated in the cloud library! 

[n1976jmk]

HI @Mark-V here is another customer to look at.  Thank you!

[JamesC]

Tickets have been opened and escalated to the engineering team detailing the issues being reported here. Thank you for all of the information that has been provided so far, the development team is currently reviewing this data to root cause the issue. I will provide an update once we have more to share.

JamesC

[Tranceblast]

Hi, I'm new at this community. (Swedish) I have exactly the same problem like some other. I have VMB4500 base with one pro2 and four pro cameras. Sometimes I can walk by and non of them recording or sends push. If I then cut the power to the base for a few seconds it works fine for like a half day. Is this related to the base or the cloud?

[n1976jmk]

Thank you very much James! @JamesC 

[JTelleria]

I experienced this issue yesterday afternoon.  UPS left a package by my front door while I was at work.  I have two cameras near the front door capturing different angles, an Arlo Pro 2 and Ultra.  I did receive a smart notification and cloud recording for the Arlo Pro 2 at time of delivery.  I did not receive a smart notification from the Ultra and there was no cloud recording.  When I arrived home later, I viewed in the iOS app the recordings on the base station’s SD card.  The Ultra had recorded the UPS delivery guy to the SD card.   The video just never made it to the cloud.  Since smart notifications depend on the videos being uploaded to the cloud, it would explain why I didn’t receive the notification. 

[Mjbeuke]

Thanks @JamesC - hopefully this is a quicker resolution than the last go around.

We can’t keep dealing with these 1-2month lapses in a functional product - or at least I can’t.... I really hope things level off soon.

We appreciate your support and updates, and as always I’m always willing to help test/diagnose

[LandJS]

It's nice as JamesC pointed out that is being looked into and hopefully resolved shortly. One suggestion they may want to adopt is to not make any untested changes just before a major holiday, especially this one.  People being without security systems for two weeks of the highest theft season of the year is not good for any brand.  It should probably apply to all major holidays as so many travel from home on those weekends.

[RSadler3]

I have also been experiencing the same issue with my cameras.
Has there been any resolves mentioned?

[LandJS]

Haven't heard from anyone at Arlo except they are looking at it but mine have worked pretty good today.  The only issue I had was the not recording until motion stops.  Car pulls up, two people get out and walk to the back open the trunk and start taking groceries  out and recording stops at 39 sec.  I believe it should go to 300.  This is within about 8 feet of the cam.  A big improvement over the last couple weeks though.  I'm sure JamesC will post as soon as he hears.

[Xian65]

Just to add to this, I’m having this same issue and like others, am getting pretty fed up. I’ve done everything possible to give these cameras a chance and nothing has helped.

I’ve:

1. Purchased outdoor power adaptors for 3 of my cameras and a solar panel for the 4th. This is comprised of 2 Ultras and 2 Pro 3 units.
2. Purchased additional base stations (Total of 1x4540 and 2x5000 hubs). All cameras show full signal strength.
3. Configured my base stations with static DHCP and configured specific profiles on my Fortigate to not touch the traffic in any way on my 250/100Mbit internet connection.
4. Deleted and re-added all cameras and base stations multiple times
5. Forfeited my 1 year free Ultra subscription to go to the new plans with no change.
6. Purchased U3/A2 USB sticks/SD Cards with huge read/write speeds

Nothing has changed the fact that like others there is a discrepancy between local and Cloud recordings with incredible misses in motion detection with and without zones active. My large bright red sedan is missed half the time as is me walking right in front of the camera.

“Smart” these notifications are not and after spending something nearing $3,000 AUD in cameras, base stations, mounts, cables etc, I’m almost at the point of calling Fair Trading NSW to start a consumer law case. Get your sh*t together ARLO !!

[ArloWatcher]

Well it seems that after I received the latest firmware push, the recording and notifications for my Arlo Pro cameras are working pretty good. Not sure about the video doorbell yet. It's another story for my Arlo Pro 3 camera. I removed motion and tracking and have started receiving some alerts from the Pro 3, but my guess is 50% are showing up.

The mobile apps (mine android and wife's apple) seem to work better than the web browser version. You now need to download the Pro 3 videos as you get a "This video is not able to play in your browser. Please download to view" message.

What gives?
When is Arlo going to fix videos not showing up in libraries
When are they updating the web page?
When is the web page dumping the use of Flash?
When will I be able to view locally stored videos?
Just some of my gripes

[Mjbeuke]

I don’t know about everyone else - but it seems that About mid-day yesterday and today so far I have received all notifications appropriately and all videos from my Ultras as showing up in the cloud recordings.

Knock on wood - but so far today zero misses.

Can anyone from Arlo confirm if the issue was identified and addressed? We were all speculating that the hardware was working fine for a few days after the update, then went to hell around Christmas so maybe we were right and it was on Arlo’s backend somewhere that’s since been addressed.

Any updates are super helpful @JamesC @Mark-V @ArloAlex

[findonsa]

It has also worked pretty well for me. Yesterday (4 Jan) all three Ultra cameras were cloud recording and notifying pretty reliably. The number of cloud recording/SD card was 340/375 = 91%, which is much more tolerable. Importantly, no significant triggered events (people, vehicle) were missed. It was a windy and hot day so there lots of motion triggers by trees, and there were few false notifications for people when it was just a shadow of trees, but I'd definitely prefer that than no notifications and recordings at all.

Edit: I went back and also counted the recordings for 3 Jan. The result was 279/337 = 82%.

Looking like it's heading in the right direction, which is good! 🤞

[n1976jmk]

Same here @Mjbeuke .

mine has been working 100% better the last couple days as well too thankfully!

I e-mailed Mark V this morning too inform him as well and have not heard back yet.

Talk soon!

[n1976jmk]

Hi @findonsa 

My cloud library recordings and smart notifications have been thankfully been working great the last couple days.

 But one important note I just found out which I wasn’t aware of is that the local recordings to the SD card record all the motion events from within the field of view of the camera.  While the recordings in our library only record motion activity with our defined activity zones (if you have activity zones set up on your cameras).  

So, it is not fair comparison for us to compare the number of recordings on the SD card vs the number of recordings in our cloud library. Not sure if you are aware of this too 

@LandJS 

@Mjbeuke 

 Thanks!

[gadgetfan]

My Cloud and SD recordings/alerts have been in sync the past two days as well. Yay! Would love to know if this is something Arlo has done in their back-end systems, or if it is the result of the changes I made to settings right before things started working better.

Shortly after I posted a few days ago, I made two changes, having seen a thread for the Pro 3 with the same issues, where this had helped someone. First, I deleted all activity zones. That helped but I thought I still saw one discrepancy. Next I went back to Super Wide (180 deg), from Full (120 deg). Since then, I have no SD recordings that do not also eventually show up in Cloud.  (I have not yet tested by going back to narrow FOV and activity zones, because the problem is intermittent and I want to be more convinced that all is well before trying to break things again.)

I have noticed that SD recordings are always of the full Super Wide view, regardless of FOV settings that affect Cloud.

I didn't know that SD recordings are also triggered by movement in the full area, even if the camera is set on a narrower field. Good to know. In my case, though, that would not explain any of my discrepancies, because the motions I was capturing (that were missed in the Cloud) were always traipsing through the whole field of view. I don't have all that many motion events because I have set to alert/record when a person is detected; that has been working very well.

I had only narrowed the field of view to test what effect, for good or ill, that had on the final saved image quality. I had only created activity zones to exclude, essentially, my ceiling or a bit of sky. Just wanted to see if that helped the system focus, or perhaps made it work harder.

I do suspect these settings could be related to the problem. Perhaps a bug exists, for example, if the SD full-view system starts recording an event that is out of range for the cloud system, and then a second later fails to trigger/record the Cloud action when the action moves into range, because it is "busy" with the SD-captured recording that had started just before.  I will do some more testing and see if I can bring the problem back. 

[findonsa]

Hi @n1976jmk,

I have seen someone mentioned about that earlier. That's why I have disabled all activity zones on my cameras. I can't see the benefits of activity zones as smart notifications are more effective in filtering notifications and you will want everything recorded to the cloud (as well as the SD card) just in case you'll need them. This is important for me as I haven't figured out how to access local storage remotely yet.