I had this interesting issue crop up in the middle of the night. I was woken up around 1:30 AM with my Simon Xti panel beeping. I thought maybe it was an image sensor battery died, weaather alert, or something like that. However, it told me that the weather sensor was down and “GSM Failure”. I’m sitting there thinking well that was some kind of mistake as I didn’t see any kind of alerts in alarm.com. So I dismissed the alert and went to bed.
I hear the beeping again just a little before 6:00 AM in the morning and check the panel. The exact same failure. This time I start doing some testing right at 6:06 AM. I try turning on and off the kitchen lights. Sending a disarm command just to see if the panel. Nothing. I check activity history and I see where I attempted to send the commands. And what’s strange is that the last activity before all that testing was at 12:13 AM saying the motion sensor was activated, but never went to idle. So I jump into programming and I can’t access interactive services. It just freezes. At this point, I’m thinking well the panel crashed. But then a thought came to mind is how come I never got an alert that the panel was not responding. I have notifications for all panel related failures. And when I tried the panel disarm command, I never got the alert from alarm.com saying that it could not determine if the system was disarmed error.
I go back to bed thinking that I will just have to reset it when I get up. I get up at 8:10 AM and I see an alert at 7:23 AM on my phone: Panel not Responding since 1:29 AM on Thursday, February 14 2019. I’m sitting there thinking it took alarm.com almost six hours to realize there was a problem. So I go and disconnect the battery on my Xti and go out to the garage to reset the circuit breaker. Panel rebooted and we are back in business.
For now, I’m not too concerned why the Xti Panel crashed unless this happens again. Sure it’s a pain as if I was traveling, I don’t think my wife would be able to reset this herself and I would have to get someone. What’s more disheartening is that it took alarm.com almost 6 hours to realize something was wrong. Based on symptoms earlier such as not telling me the system did not respond to being disarmed. And yes I know the system was already disarmed. Purpose was to see if the panel could receive it and if alarm.com would report a failure. Since I got none of that, I’m quite confident that I never would have received an alarm event if one did occur.
Is it by design that it takes almost 6 hours for alarm.com to report a panel issue?