Alarm.com Notifications and User Setup

Hey, guys. Hayden here from Alarm System Store again. And today I'm going to be doing a video on Alarm.com's notifications and user sections. These are probably the two most common areas that you will get into, once you get your service up and going. And I want to try and kind of make a series out of this where I go through and as I add stuff to our IQ panel from my previous video that we activated, I'll just show more, more and more advanced features of alarm.com. So later on we'll get into automation. in the scenes and things like that. But for now, I just want to cover the notifications and users. I also plan on doing app videos of where I show the Alarm.com app because there are differences. I do have to get recording software, screen capture software for my phone. So once I do that, I'll start putting out app videos and basically just follow the same stuff that we're doing here. But anyway, so here's a home screen. This is what's going to come up when you get logged in for the first time. And if you already have alarm.com and you should know how this page works at the very least. And basically it's just going to show any activity in this, thing picture area right here where it says today's activity.


And right now the Qolsys panel doesn't have anything attached to it. So there's nothing happening. It won't show any activity. but if you have motion sensors, doors, whatever they are, as those sensors are activated, you will see these bars go up showing at what time the activity happened. Other than that, over here, just give you a welcome and let you know the last time the system was disarmed and the latest status of the pending. Right below that it says system. Okay. If you have trouble conditions on your system, you can show that here underneath there you have your scenes. And like I said we will get into those in a video. But underneath that we have the weather forecast for the your zip code. That's this big main card. And this is where you're going to get most of the information from your people. Unless there's something specific you're looking for. The next card I want to look at is this top right one. This is actually the arming card for your system. Right now I don't have any I don't have the system name. So this is people. But if you have a name plugged in for your alarm system, it will show up right there.


And if we click on this green icon it actually brings up the arming methods, their stay in a way which most people will be familiar with. But there's also three options above this that affect the way it comes. So this first one is no entry delay. If you click that and select stay Away, what it does is it removes the entry delay period. When you open your front door and the system starts counting down, it will no longer count down. So if you're going to arm in no entry delay, make sure that if you are away, you disarm the system before you go in because it will immediately set off the alarm. It's very handy function for being in at night though, because you can arm and stay mode. And if you're in the house sleeping, there is no entry delay period where if somebody opens the door, they do have time to, you know, get in before the system goes off. So very handy feature. silent arming. Also handy basically silences the keypad so it doesn't beep while its arming. Force bypass this one, you won't need to often unless you have a sensor open for some reason. So for example, if you had like a busted window contact and it was not showing closed and it was giving you trouble, if you're still in the process of replacing that, you can click Force Bypass and it will still let you arm the system. Basically just tells the system to disregard any open sensors whenever you arm it.

We're not going to arm at the moment, but once the system is armed, this icon will change to whatever color you choose here. So if you click stay, it'll be orange is red, and at the bottom it'll show you the current status and say arm stay or armed away from the card. Right below that is in is an images tab the only reason this is showing up on my home screen is because that courses panel has a built in camera. so whenever you armored disarm, the alarm goes off. It takes a picture. Right now, there's nothing on there because it hasn't taken any pictures. But this is the image sensor card as well. So if you have image sensors on your system, they're a little bit lesser used nowadays since they have cameras. But image sensors are very handy for, targeting a specific cooling. So when motion goes by or system goes off again, you can basically take an image of that location at any time. There's also recent activity down here, which is essentially this larger one you just listed out by what the event was. You can see yesterday I did arm and disarm the panel and it shows that I have other activity. It'll show the most recent updated activity and that updates almost instantly as it happens. So.

This next card is suggestions. I do definitely recommend checking this in all of the options that it's going to give you in here. All recommended setups for alarm.com. I'm not going to dig into those too much. we will in a later video, but for now, just know that if you click on these, they will give you instructions and different features that are useful to set up for a lot of people. I also have a lights tab right here for lights called basically. That's because there's a Z-Wave light attached to the system. so as you add Z-Wave and automation devices, you will see additional cards pop up like there's an irrigation card, a water flow card, there's a camera card. If you have any cameras on the system. there's all kinds of basically home screen cards that'll be added as you, increase the amount of devices on your system. So that way it's all contained on this home screen, and you can just go right to it. Anyway, let's get into the notifications. So over here on the left you see the notifications tab. You're going to click that. And by default this along room notification is not on. So whenever you first get logged into alarm.com you do need to go to the notifications to make sure you set this up. I did set mine up before I armed and disarmed yesterday. I was going to test it and show you guys, but since I only have my email plugged in, I don't get, you know, push notifications or anything like that right now. It will give you suggested notifications. So like for here system was not armed by a certain time. That's typically pretty handy. So you can set this up in a multitude of ways. So if you leave every morning at the same time, go to work and you would like to set up a notification just in case you forget to arm the system. let's say you leave at 630 in the morning at 630. If the system hasn't been armed by then, it will send a notification to you letting you know, hey, system was an armed. Are you sure you want this armed or would you like to arm?

The next one is System Actions to watch. This one covers a large range of different notifications, such as like AC loss systems unable to arm for whatever reason, malfunctioning devices. there's a lot of different ones. I'm not going to go over every single one, but definitely check that section out. It's got a lot of important notifications in it. By default, you go get this unexpected activity turned on, as well as severe weather alerts. Those are automatic, just to kind of show you guys how these notifications are set up, I'm going to go ahead and do this one. So we open at 9 a.m. eastern time. So let's say I was at home I got to leave it 815. So go and plug in 815. And then you can select every day or just the days that you would like this notification to Earth. And basically if the system isn't armed by 815 every morning then it's going to send me a notification says forgot to list this up here can be changed. You can name it whatever you want. After you've done that, you've named it and you've chosen when you would like it to go off. You do have to add recipients to the notification. So if I click add right here. So like I said, I only have my email here. But I can click email. And then those. And now this email is going to get that notification at 815 in every day. If I don't arm the system on time I'm not going to save this because I already have abundance of emails for those things right now. Just know that if you click save, it would create this notification and you can come back and edit it at any time. Lauren notification I wanted to edit that for some reason over here to this pencil. Click that and basically set this up. However I wanted. So this one you can actually choose any sensors or specific sensors. There's time frames.

The alarms one is always going to be any time you can choose whether it's going to give you a notification on audible alarms, silent alarms, or both. Now, silent alarms are typically caused by duress. Somebody entering it was found on your system. Somebody is forcing you to disarm the panel and you type in that risk code. You don't want your phone going off saying, hey, you have an alarm on your system. So you can actually turn that silent off. And that way it doesn't send you a notification when the system goes off. In those scenarios down here, it does give you a warning. Do not choose to send a duress panic estimate or push notification to a potential duress code user. So let's say like for example, if my wife's a stay at home wife, if I wanted to have her get notifications for audible alarms, that would not be a terrible idea. But silent alarms, since she's home every day, if she ever happens to activate that duress code, I don't want her phone going off, basically letting whoever is there know that she just set off the alarm so you can customize these in very handy ways. Again, you do have to add recipients. I'm just not myself added here. Click save and it saves it. There. Notifications are pretty straightforward, but there are an abundance of different notification types that you can set up. So up here in the top right you can see the new notifications button. Click on that. And there are dozens of different notification types that you can set up. And all of these are editable. however like custom set up forums. So go through those, see if there's any you'd like. Basically set the system up or set alarm.com up how you would like it to work for you.

Up here at the top under the notifications in the black area there's two different tabs. There's notifications, then there's push devices. Right now I don't have any push devices because I don't have a phone hooked up to my alarm.com. But if you did, there are editable sections for that. I'll go into more depth on this one whenever I get my phone up and going for the screen capture, I can add it to the Alarm.com so I can show push device editing. But anyway, let's go check out users real quick and users is pretty straightforward. The most confusing aspect of this is the difference between a user and a log in. So for example, if I wanted to create a user like add new user, get the name, say it's Fred. He and create. What this does is it creates a user on the system. It does not create a login for alarm.com. This is only to give somebody a code to your alarm system. So you can either plug in a manual code to conform or you can click generate code. It can read that random code. And once you've got a code plugged in there, then you will select what system that's going to be attached to. So with alarm.com you can attach multiple systems, which I will do in another video here soon. but for now I just have the IQ system, which as I mentioned is anal. So turn this on. And now Fred P has user code 6010 for IQ panel save. It creates his user code. I can add contact info to that. I can set the panels in the times for when he's allowed, arm and disarm the system. Using that code I can set language preference if that part English speaking or whatever the case may be. I can also share this user code with them. So once I had contact info would say I put phone number or an email, whatever in there. I can share it with them and it just sends them, the form helps them get, acquainted with their user code and their systems they can access at the time. They can access.

You can also delete user here. I'm not actually going to do that because I don't need for it on here right now. sometimes that little something went wrong popped up. But it does complete the action warm. That comes pretty good about that. Anyway, now that Fred is gone, I'm going to show you the difference between a user and a login. So if you go to manage logins up here at the top, this is actually how you create additional app or computer logins for other people. So say I wanted to make one for my wife plug in email address there. I would give her a login name. I'm just going to go ahead and enter my stuff with this handy anyway, plug those in and then select Language Preference. Click save. And then on this page this it looks like a lot. But basically what you are doing is selecting permissions for that login. So you can either give them master control which is essentially a secondary master account like the main login. you can give them full control, which basically is everything, but they do not have the ability to manage website logins. They won't receive certain types of account notification that only go to the primary log. there's a read only, which is basically if you want to just let them see what's going on with the system, it doesn't let them do anything with the system, like they can't arm and disarm, but they can see all of the information for it. There's limited device access as well. I'm not 100% sure, exactly how this one works. I've never used it, but, I believe this allows somebody to, like, you basically pick the devices that you would like them to be able to control. So like let's say you had somebody that you wanted to give a login for your irrigation. The team, you could do that. And then if they ever needed to activate the irrigation control for your location, they could log in and they could do whatever, automation is associated with that. There's also custom rules, which is what all this is down here. So as you can see, you can do remote arming, seeing control, user code management. You can choose exactly how each login is going to be able to affect your account. So read through these. Make sure you set these logins up the way that you want. And then whenever you're done you click save. And now that secondary login is created here. And if you want to add more over here or there's that little trash can button, you can just delete it. Whatever the case may be, if the obsession, you just don't want them to have access to you on that more.

But anyway, you can actually come over here to more. The only thing that's here right now is show user code. So if I had multiple users plugged in here, it basically just pops up with three, as you can see. Like I haven't changed anything on that IQ panel. So it's just the default 1234. But if you had, you know, multiple people that is users on your system, it would show all of the user codes all the way down associated with that user. So that's really all there is to it. those two tabs are pretty straightforward. I just wanted to go over them because some people tend to miss the notifications tab and what all you can do with it. Like I said, there is an abundance of different types of notifications, and as you add things, different devices for automation or different types of, alarms, sensors, security sensors, more notifications will show up. So you can really customize this however you want, and you can make it notify you in any scenario. Pretty much. So that's all I have for today. I will be back soon, and we're going to go over some more of these tabs over here. I want to do automation as well as video here one of these days. Not sure quite when I'll get to it, but, automation. I need more devices right now. I just have that light hooked up so I'm going to get a couple more devices so that I can show you guys how to integrate things together rather than have them just use them individually. So. But yeah. hope you guys enjoyed this video. if there's anything specific that you guys would like to see with Alarm.com, or curious about learning more of, please let us know in the comments. I'll try to do a video on it as soon as I can. Basically. And warm.com covers pretty much everything you could want to do with an Alarm.com system, as well as the smart device automation. So once we get into more of that, you'll see that. But we do want to make this so that you guys can come to our channel and find the videos that you want and what would be helpful to you. So go ahead and let us know in the comments what you would like. Other than that, just like and subscribe. You guys know the drill and I will catch you guys on the next one.