Uplink overreporting (and bad NextAlarm)

[LaurentR]

A couple of weeks ago, I had a bad experience with the Uplink/Elk/NextAlarm triangle, and while Uplink and Elk were pretty useful, NextAlarm was useless.

The full story is below. But there is a piece of data interesting to all Uplink user that I thought I would need to record here:

If you report through Uplink too much, Uplink will flag your account as runaway and will disable your Uplink remotely.

Granted, the limit is pretty high. I didn't get a number from them, but it was something like 100 messages in a few hours.
I assume they either pay per SMS or have a limit with the cell company, so they must have an incentive to do this.

Why did I bump into that?

1. I want to log some non-alarm things like people opening/closing of my front or side gate and doorbell presses. May do more later, especially if I use these events to activate cameras.
2. Because the Elk has such a short log (512 events) and the events above are fairly frequent, I am reporting these events to NextAlarm, since they log everything.
3. I don't like the idea of Uplink being just a backup, because my panel is very easily accessible, so it's configured to double report through landline and Uplink
4. To report events, you must have some kind of violation, so I am using Aux1 fro the zones I want to report for logging. unfortunately, the Elk can't make Aux1 alarm report through one mechanism and not the other ones (they have configuration for several reporting types, but Aux1 is part of the "alarm" category, which you obviously want to report).
5. As a consequence, all my non-alarm events are also reported through the Uplink to NextAlarm.
6. I am not sure what happened that particular day (probably a contractor going in and out and closing/opening the gate everytime), but I bumped into Uplink's limit and they disabled my Uplink.

Now for the story:

When that happened, the only thing that was wrong is the Elk panel throwing an Uplink error (which you have to catch with a rule - and I couldn't find a way to report it except for triggering an output that's physically wired to an input zone in Aux1... Is there a better way?). The Uplink itself blinked 100% normally, and NextAlarm was half happy (getting reporting by phone, but not by Uplink).

Now begins the infernal triangle. Who's the culprit?

• Elk panel
• wiring
• Uplink box
• Configuration at Uplink
• NextAlarm Uplink configuration sent to Uplink (if you;re a NextAlarm customer, you don't deal directly with Uplink, NextAlarm takes care of sending all the info to Uplink).

First thing was to call NextAlarm to see if they could check on Uplink (the company). Two tickets and 5 days later: "Nothing wrong here, check your panel". Yellow card.

Next, I emailed Elk (Hi Brad!). They didn't tell me much the first time around, but thought that the Uplink box was either broken or couldn't connect to the Uplink server (remember that the Uplink box LEDs blinked happily).

As a good engineer, I start going at the problem by dichotomy. Check the cable. Change XSPs around. Upgrade firmware. Reset panel. No change.

Then I put a scope on the RS232 between the panel and the Uplink(!). I can see a short message from the Uplink to the panel every 2 minutes and nothing going back.

I email Elk back. They suggest that the Uplink is not sending the proper polling command, which is more frequent than that, so they're not responding. Problem seems to be on the Uplink hardware.

I end up simultaneously emailing Uplink to get the serial protocol (got it in a few hours - that's customer service!) and putting my laptop on the Uplink serial port to see what's on the link. I send the result to Elk, which confirms that this is not the right polling command. I get the Uplink protocol, which confirms that the polling command is not sent. The 2 minute command is a command saying "SMS service available". So the Uplink box seems happy, can talk to the network, but somehow doesn't want to let the panel talk to it.

I finally bite the bullet and call Uplink directly. They end up being very nice and helpful despite my not being a direct customer. They had a lot of trouble figuring out what was wrong with my account, because the heavy reporting was obviously stretching the capacity of their event database. Finally, I help them getting to the date where everything stops and they find that:

• They disabled remotely my uplink box because it was deemed in runaway mode.
• They had called NextAlarm to make sure they did something about it. Their log of the conversation showed that the person in charge of Uplink at NextAlarm was unavailable and they had to leave a message for him.

In the mean time, I had a ticket exchange with NextAlarm, who kept to their line "nothing wrong here, check your panel". Red card for them. I ask them what happened (in a ticket). They didn't bother responding.

The epilogue is that I asked Uplink to reenable my box, which they did (it took 10 seconds). Everything came back to normal except that I stopped reporting non-alarm events to NextAlarm as Elk (Hi Brad!) told me that I couldn't report those only to my landline and not my Uplink...

Any alternative to NextAlarm? I spent a week without wireless backup and countless hours debugging this @#$%^& issue. They could have helped me but totally ignored my issue. I see a lot of "great service" on NextAlarm on this board (which is why I chose them), but on this one, I got horrible service, and before that generally mediocre service (trying to figure out some of the blank entries in the log and double reporting).

Laurent

 

[alarmguy]

Laurent


Your situation and finding in this “triangle” as you stated, are very interesting and informative. Thanks for sharing the information. I am sure it could be useful to members in the future. If I may ask what model Uplink are you using with your Elk M1. Thanks again.

LMW

 

[LaurentR]

I use the Uplink AnyNet:
http://www.uplink.com/Technology/Uplink-iA...ET__anynet.aspx
which does full reporting through the serial link with and Elk panel, and communicates with the Uplink servers using SMS over GSM. They claim to have other communication options on the box, but I have never seen anything else than SMS/GSM.

It's nicely supported by Elk through a M1XSP (serial port expander). I built my own cable for it following instructions (pretty easy).

Laurent

 

[BrettS]

It's quite normal for alarm monitoring companies to block accounts in runaway status... and certainly recieving several hundred signals in a short time period would qualify for that. The problem is that an account that's transmitting that frequently can block incoming phone lines and reciever lines and prevent other people's alarm signals from getting through.

That said, however, the way it was handled was terrible. The central station needs to block runaway alarms to protect itself and it's other customers (and 99% of the time a runaway alarm is not functioning anyway), however people rely on their alarms to operate 100% of the time, so notifying someone that their alarm has been blocked (and likely has failed) should be a fairly high priority. The fact that you were not contacted within several hours... and actually had to make several phone calls to get to the bottom of things is completely unacceptable.

I would guess that the way you have your system set up to report every single door and gate opening is a pretty unusual configuration, so this is certainly not something most monitoring companies would see, and unfortunately, I suspect that you may run into issues with your account being blocked no matter what company you go with. If all you need is an access log you might look into connecting a computer to your elk panel and log access that way.

Brett

 

[DeLicious]

So, it turned out this thread was quite useful! NextAlarm stopped sending me email notifications a couple days ago, so I logged in to their website to check, and nothing had been reported. In fact, the last 3 events were totally blank, a very odd occurrence.

So, I remembered this thread, and promptly called Uplink instead of NextAlarm, and sure enough, they had disconnected my module because of overreporting. I rebooted my Elk and my Uplink, they re-enabled it, and everything is hunky dory again.