After successfully setting up my vera lite and running it for about a month I had to unplug it and move it to another location. To my surprise I received no notification that my Vera was no longer available after I unplugged it. Curios I kept it unplugged for about three days. Shouldn’t there be a txt message or email sent to me whenever the Vera loses it’s network connection? or loses power in my case? I set up all my alert info in the unit but I did not receive any notification that my Vera was offline. Anyone know how to fix this?
Why would you expect to receive a notification that your Vera is offline? You would need to setup your own monitoring of Vera from another computer to check on Vera and send you a notification by some other means.
- Garrett
I’m fascinated that this was your expectation and that you were actually surprised that you weren’t notified. Did you really wait three days in anticipation of such an alert? Does any device you own behave in this fashion?
No there is no notification that Vera is unplugged or lost internet connection. All of Vera’s notifications originate from the Vera itself. So, if you disconnect Vera, it naturally would not be able to send such a notification thus making the creation of such a notification process pointless.
It is technically feasible to create such a notification, but it would require that Micasaverde’s servers monitor the Vera connections and originate the alert themselves. At this time, this capability does not exist. But, it’s a neat idea. You should put in a feature request.
Well now, I’m a bit more learn-ed about this Vera device. So this truly is a stand-alone device then, the vera/micasa/mios “servers” do absolutely no monitoring of your device whats so ever, other than sign you up for an account. Whats the point of them collecting my Vera logs then? I find it strange that a device that is marketing itself as your whole-home automation and security solution does not have any simple are-you-there test to tell you your vera device has lost power or no longer reachable. So if you’re away from your house and Vera loses power (or inet), then thieves can have at it to your house because you’ll never be notified of a door sensor tripping because your Vera is offline. Seems to me they need to fix that pretty quick, a simple I’m-still-alive check in ping to the Vera servers would solve this.
Don’t get me wrong, I fully understand this is a free service and beggars can’t be choosers, but my free eyez-on account for my DSC system does this (via EVL-3). Yes btw I have the DSC plugin for my Vera, still trying to get it work correctly.
Thanks for the feedback, as Z-Waver mentioned I’ll put a feature request in for this and see where it goes. Thx.
Micasaverde servers provide many things(for free) including:
NAT firewall friendly, secure, remote access.
A repository for backups.
A logging repository.
Notification channels. (email, SMS…)
A mechanism for technical support access.
A user management/authentication system.
They don’t, as of yet, provide monitoring.
There are plenty of free monitoring services that could be used, personally I use monitor.us which gives me push alerts on my phone as well as emails.
[quote=“garrettwp, post:2, topic:177774”]Why would you expect to receive a notification that your Vera is offline? You would need to setup your own monitoring of Vera from another computer to check on Vera and send you a notification by some other means.
- Garrett[/quote]
I have actually looked into this idea via a server with Cacti to monitor as much Vera units as you want (would be helpful for me as I plan to become an installer), but all I found was one french forum post and although it mentions a work around for this, but I think it was just on local LAN, to be technically useful, it needs to be remote monitoring… Are you aware of any way this can be done?
Micasaverde servers could possibly monitor Veras because Vera maintains a secure tunnel connection with MCV servers. Remote monitoring services including monitor.us, Cacti, or better still Nagios, will all need firewall ports to be opened so that they can reach or at least ping the Vera. This is not a good idea.
The way around opening ports would be to use some custom agent or process on Vera that sends periodic keep alives to the monitoring server or have a LAN based PC that monitors Vera and reports back to the monitoring service. This quickly becomes a non-trivial task due to added machines, complexity, external hosting costs, management… It’s not worth it, in my not so humble opinion…
This is one of the reasons to not use Vera as an alarm system. It is not an adequate substitute for a dedicated and monitored alarm system. Using a proper alarm system, which you can also integrate with Vera if you wish, provides remote monitoring, cellular network backup notification channel, battery backup, lower cost sensors, increased reliability… These things have all been discussed extensively on this forum and it has long been the consensus here to use an alarm system, such a s DSC, for security and integrate it with Vera for automation.
Z-Waver, thanks for that response, I’m on board with that thinking. I thought maybe I could ditch the alarm panel monitoring I currently have and just use one box/service/app for that, meaning the Vera. However as you allude to the Vera’s strength is in it’s automation abilities not so much critical device monitoring as in a 24/7 alarm system. Wouldn’t be surprised though if one day Vera adopted that level of service, seems to be a lot of support and developement on this platform. Thanks again for the feedback 8)