Galaxy Monitoring IP

[Litch90]

Which option would you say is better for monitoring a FLEX panel?

 

-Pay for a E080 ethernet board (70-100 quid) GX remote app...

-LCE 01 ethernet board (£56.00) and SelfMon for one pound a month

 

Thing is, by the time you've paid £56.00 for the PCB and a £1 per month to use the platform you could have just bought the official product off honeywell. Not knocking

this Self Mon i've just seen lots of rave reviews about it and want to know what fellow security professionals think of it?

 

I can pick up a E080 ethernet mod for £70 brand new, so playing devils advocate tell me why I should consider SelfMon?

 

 

[GalaxyGuy]

Let me correct some assumptions in your questions.  I'll also try to give an unbiased view, but will note that I run SelfMon Ltd, so will let others chime in if they feel I am being misleading in any way.

 

Firstly, the Flex V3 does not accept the E080 modules. It will only offer full IP functionality with the A083 Ethernet module. Honeywell reduced the cost of the A083 to ~£100, so that makes cost a bit more palatable when adding IP to the V3 panel.   The LCE modules are not compatible with the V3 Flex at the moment.

 

Both the SelfMon platform and Honeywell's push notification service work with the A083 module in the Flex V3 panel.

 

Here's some key points and +/- of the systems:

 

- Honeywell's notification is push notification via their GX app only, but it's free, so worth trying out to see if it suits. SelfMon supports Push, Email, SMS, Voice, URL calling and allows events to be filtered to recipients in a number of ways.  It costs a minimum of £1 a month, but can cost more if you want to have multiple chargeable SMS or Voice calls above the £1 monthly limit.  Support will be provided for customers with a SelfMon account.

 - Honeywell added an option into the Flex firmware to enable suppression of IP based issues, so if  a message doesn't send, the issue is only logged to the engineering log.  This allows the ARC side to take care of missing signals and makes dealing with issues much easier.  This isn't available for the other Galaxy Dimension/G2/Classic panels, but an additional override was added to the LCE module to enable this for those panels.

- Honeywell's push notification is free, but there is no support and it's difficult to resolve any issues with their support team. It's been reliable in general, but the mistake Honeywell made was to introduce sequential account numbers, meaning that it would be easy for a hacker to send events to all customer accounts.

- SelfMon supports line path checking and the Flex V3 panel can provide a test signal at one minute granularity.  To reduce load, the platform will only alert after 1hr of missing test signal.  Honeywell's push notification doesn't have any missing signal check.

- SelfMon supports its own DNS, making it easy for the app to call back to the premises where a dynamic IP address is being used.  If you use Honeywell's GX app and have a dynamic IP address, you need a separate DNS service to reach the premises.

- Neither Honeywell or SelfMon offer a graded service with any response guarantee.  These systems are unmanned notification services. If police response is required, then a graded platform should be used (something dual path with decent polling of 60 minutes or less would be advisable).

 

Can you really pick up the E080-4 or E080-8 for £70.  That's pretty low considering they are normally ~£200.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[MrHappy]

1 hour ago, GalaxyGuy said:

Can you really pick up the E080-4 or E080-8 for £70.

 

Ebay, looking in leading security wholesaler portal- more than double, +vat

[al-yeti]

21 hours ago, Litch90 said:

Which option would you say is better for monitoring a FLEX panel?

 

-Pay for a E080 ethernet board (70-100 quid) GX remote app...

-LCE 01 ethernet board (£56.00) and SelfMon for one pound a month

 

Thing is, by the time you've paid £56.00 for the PCB and a £1 per month to use the platform you could have just bought the official product off honeywell. Not knocking

this Self Mon i've just seen lots of rave reviews about it and want to know what fellow security professionals think of it?

 

I can pick up a E080 ethernet mod for £70 brand new, so playing devils advocate tell me why I should consider SelfMon?

 

 

Honeywell support for you will be poor , I don't use the aelfmon service only the virtual keypad with fixed ip

 

Shame the keypad doesn't have multiple accounts yet 

 

Come on mrGG 

[Litch90]

2 minutes ago, al-yeti said:

Honeywell support for you will be poor , I don't use the aelfmon service only the virtual keypad with fixed ip

 

Shame the keypad doesn't have multiple accounts yet 

 

Come on mrGG 

Virtual Keypad? Whats that about al-yeti? I know what you mean you get the galaxy keypad but is it an app how do you use it?

[al-yeti]

24 minutes ago, Litch90 said:

Virtual Keypad? Whats that about al-yeti? I know what you mean you get the galaxy keypad but is it an app how do you use it?

Selfmon has a keypad which works with the galaxy range , can't remember which models though I only use it on the dimensions and G2 I think

 

Look on playstore or apply app stores and it's basically the Honeywell keypad

 

For sure it's response is much better than the Honeywell app which locks up on some devices 

 

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smalarms.kp

[GalaxyGuy]

27 minutes ago, al-yeti said:

Selfmon has a keypad which works with the galaxy range , can't remember which models though I only use it on the dimensions and G2 I think

 

Look on playstore or apply app stores and it's basically the Honeywell keypad

 

For sure it's response is much better than the Honeywell app which locks up on some devices 

 

 

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smalarms.kp

 

 

Try the new beta version. It supports multiple accounts on Android.  The released iOS version already has the capability.

https://www.sm-alarms.co.uk/apps/main/getAVKPAPP.php

 

The SelfMon VKP works on all models. It also works with anything that supports a secure IP tunnel.  WebWay Etc.    One caveat is the G2 series, where the LCE module is needed to provide the virtualkeypad, as Honeywell's module doesn't provide it.

 

 

[al-yeti]

1 hour ago, GalaxyGuy said:

 

 

Try the new beta version. It supports multiple accounts on Android.  The released iOS version already has the capability.

https://www.sm-alarms.co.uk/apps/main/getAVKPAPP.php

 

The SelfMon VKP works on all models. It also works with anything that supports a secure IP tunnel.  WebWay Etc.    One caveat is the G2 series, where the LCE module is needed to provide the virtualkeypad, as Honeywell's module doesn't provide it.

 

 

Good thing I am a basher , just lost all the existing data lol no warning on update , of course I don't read stuff anyway never mind

[GalaxyGuy]

7 minutes ago, al-yeti said:

Good thing I am a basher , just lost all the existing data lol no warning on update , of course I don't read stuff anyway never mind

 

Sorry, I should have mentioned that. It's one of the reasons I have not pushed the release and left at beta.   The new app uses the sugar ORM database interface in the background to hold all the accounts that you add.  It's a real pain in the butt development wise, as it's too ifficult to provide an upgrade path to bring the old app settings forward.  I think that I will eventually have to force all users to upgrade, but expect to take some negatives for doing so...  App development is a pain. You can't just release and forget. OS updates mean that things constantly need updated.  It's very time consuming when an older API is dropped and you need to re-write part of the application.

[al-yeti]

24 minutes ago, GalaxyGuy said:

 

Sorry, I should have mentioned that. It's one of the reasons I have not pushed the release and left at beta.   The new app uses the sugar ORM database interface in the background to hold all the accounts that you add.  It's a real pain in the butt development wise, as it's too ifficult to provide an upgrade path to bring the old app settings forward.  I think that I will eventually have to force all users to upgrade, but expect to take some negatives for doing so...  App development is a pain. You can't just release and forget. OS updates mean that things constantly need updated.  It's very time consuming when an older API is dropped and you need to re-write part of the application.

That's ok I know your updating the website now for others to say backup your data 

 

Not that it's much to remember lol