Professional Monitoring through Scout Alarm

We’re excited to announce the launch of a 24/7 professional home monitoring service with Scout Alarm. With this integration, you can enhance how you monitor and secure your home by dispatching the police in response to a home break-in.

The Deets
When you receive an incident through the Smart Home Monitor feature of the SmartThings app that shows unexpected entry in your home, you can choose to dismiss it or respond yourself. If you don’t disarm Smart Home Monitor within 90 seconds, a UL-certified dispatcher from Scout will call you to see if you’d like them to dispatch the police.

This new premium feature only requires the Samsung SmartThings Hub and compatible open/closed sensors.

How-it-Works-Scout-final

The Deal
SmartThings 24/7 professional home monitoring service with Scout will be available for $19.99 per month.

To sign up, tap the Main Menu on the first screen within Smart Home Monitor (it’s the three dots in the top-right-hand corner). Then tap Configure (if you have an iPhone) or Setup (if you have an Android). You’ll then see an option for Scout Alarm. Tap to see step-by-step instructions to register for a new Scout Alarm account.

Scout-Step-1 Scout-Step-2 (1)

Category:
Featured, SmartThings Updates
Tags:
, , , , ,

Join the conversation! 30 Comments

  1. Wouldn’t this require an alarm permit in most cities if there is an SLA with a third party?

    Reply
    • Answered my own question, which is on the Scout website…Yes, it does:

      Your municipality might require a permit for any security system that includes police dispatching…

      Reply
  2. How about you spend less time working up deals with security companies and more time getting your product to actually work? Since I setup my home with SmartThings I’ve grown more disappointed with your company every day. The system regularly fails to detect events like a user entering the geo fenced zone so I come home and the alarm goes off, the app is horribly slow to load and response is laggy, and as of today it’s been totally down because your servers are all messed up. Invest more money in your servers so they don’t go down (making my entire home dark with no working light switches, THANKS!) and regularly so slow that pushing a button occasionally takes 5-10 seconds before any action (on a stable 300mbps network) I can stream 4k video on my network but I can’t turn the lights on? My light switches working should not be tied to your horribly managed servers. Even after your latest update on http://status.smartthings.com/ things are still not working. You are failing horribly, get your act together.

    Reply
    • I heard that the new 2.0 hub does not rely on the internet at all. Is that not correct???

      Reply
      • I would not know, even though I only recently placed my order with them they sent me an old hub. They also sent me a broken motion detector. The list of problems I’ve had with SmartThings since day one is ridiculous.

        Reply
      • It depends but some routines are now executed locally and it does have battery backup. Keep in mind I just found an issue, if you had Scout Monitoring with the v1 hub, it doesn’t port when you migrate to the v2 hub. I now have a support case open with Smartthings and Scout.

        Reply
      • 2.0 has been complete garbage, not worth the investment at all

        Reply
    • I agree. It is a joke to offer monitoring when the hub is unreliable. Mine is offline probably due to the same crash Chris is posting about and I am away from home for the holidays so IT WILL REMAIN OFFLINE UNTIL I RETURN! Customer support says a hard reboot, pressing a button, is needed. Great alarm system, folks!

      Reply
  3. It’s clear fro the description how to sign up for monitoring, but what about the sensor? Does it just show up at my doorstep? Do I need to buy one from the site and enter a different code?

    Please help a confused customer out. :)

    Reply
    • You’re not the only confused customer, would be great to get an answer on how the free sensor will be offered.

      Reply
      • Hey guys–
        After you’ve signed up for the Scout home monitoring offer, we will ship the free sensor straight to your home at no cost to you. You can expect to receive your free sensor within 2-3 weeks. Thanks, and hope that helps!

        Reply
  4. Aside from the home monitoring: Does this means Smartthings sees/works with Scout sensors now? So far we had to set it through IFTTT, can it be done directly with Smartthings?

    Reply
  5. I’m glad to see professional monitoring service added, it’s one of the few things preventing me from investing into owning Smartthings, but $20/mo? That’s the same price as if I had Scout system and their system has additional features like 3G backup. And soon you will start charging for video on top of that? How about $10-$15 and give me both pro monitoring and video for one price?

    Reply
    • I would not trust SmartThings with security. For example, today they are having application issues that have prevented me from switching my house from “ARMED” to “DISARMED.” This means every time I open a door the alarm is triggered, and there is no way to prevent that. Also keep in mind that the opposite frequently happens, where the system should be armed but is disarmed. Trusting security to a product that only occasionally works is playing with fire.

      Reply
  6. So I’ve spent a few $100 bucks on Smartthings Devices and you want $20/month for this service? Xfinity charges $20/month for a similar monitoring service but that includes the many security devices. If I’m going to spend $20/month I might as well contact Xfinity. That way, if a sensor, etc goes bad it will be replaced at no cost.

    Reply
    • You forgot to add that they charge for the tech to come out and install any and all devices. That was the BIG reason for not going with a: xfinity, ADP, Comcast, etc….

      Reply
    • Signing a long-term contract (2-3 years) with Xfinity is what subsidizes the cost of the devices. You’re essentially “renting” the equipment until the contract is fullfilled, at which time you will own the equipment (similar to cell phone contracts). If you don’t want to sign a contract, you’ll have to pay more for devices up front. There is no such thing as “free”. They’ll get you one way or the other.

      Reply
  7. Surprised to see all of the general bashing and want to put in my 2 cents for someone considering Smart Things. I came in in version 2 and have been VERY happy overall. I’ve continued to order devices and probably have 30 or so connected things. I can accomplish a lot I couldn’t before. This includes turning on a coffee maker and turning it off if left on, alerts for windows opened too long, alerts when I leave the house and left a window open, automatic setting by geofence and motion for alerts when my house has an intrusion, turning on and off my dehumidifier and HVAC fan by humidity level, turning on lights by sunset and sunrise. I just ordered water leak sensors. The list goes on and on.

    I had a few glitches but overall they were resolved (mostly easily) and SmartThings team has been very responsive in helping. The frustration reminds me of people’s expectation of computers. Mac for example has helped cultivate a preposterous reputation for “just working”. True, they generally work and I think they are well made but are complicated and need little fixes all the time -just part of the deal it turns out. You can’t call Apple but need to go wait 2 hours in so-called “Genius Bars”. I hate them and have found they are not full of geniuses. I am glad I can call into Smart Things and get someone to help me resolve things pretty quickly. So far, my experience is closer to just working with Samsung than with Apple and I have several of the latter’s devices in my home and pocket. If you investigate Homekit, you will see that Apple is a couple of years out from making their strategy really happen. I’m surprised how advanced this system and am convinced that it is prime time now and the best system.

    On the monitoring service…In my area in CA. they want $50-60 a month and this is way cheaper. That being said, it does seem higher than I want to pay so I hope they bring it down. Glad to see it offered if it’s a vigilant, trustworthy service.

    I love the service and would do it again in a heartbeat.

    Reply
    • It’s not bashing, it’s outraged consumers who purchased a product that does not work. It’s now 3 months later, and every day the quality of SmartThings has decreased for me. The app is slower, does not load frequently, their interface with the Philips Hue API only works about 80% of the time, their SONOS interface is now unresponsive on my system, my front door sensor is detecting knocks at random intervals with no vibration but fails to detect knocks if you kick the door repeatedly, the system fails to detect my phone frequently so I come home and trigger the alarm and often can’t dismiss the alarm because the app fails to load fully or takes 1-2 minutes to load, when alarms trigger and tells Philips Hue lights to turn red as a warning they have their brightness set to around 5% after being turned on by the system the next time (and this has been reported repeatedly for months with no bug fix), and today the app lost the ability to switch from “ARMED” to “DISARMED” so every time I open a door the alarm is triggered and there is no way to fix that with the app not working, and when the system activates the “Good Morning!” routine to turn my lights on all Philips Hue lights turn on then instantly set their brightness to 0% even though that routine has no brightness settings associated with it, and scheduled routines (like turning a light on/off at specific times) have a known bug where the routine dies and needs to be manually reset from the developer interface. Right now every time an event sends a command to the cloud to interface with an external API like Philips there is a good chance that the resulting response never makes it back to your local hub. The result is another issue I’ve had, walking into a room where motions sensors turn on the lights only to stand there in darkness for up to 2 minutes before the lights turn on, if they ever do. Those are all problems I’ve had in the last 3 months, and not one of them has been fixed. nnAnd those are just the bugs I’m recalling now offhand, trust me that’s not even half of them!nnThe only positive thing I can say about SmartThings is that their support staff is amazing, helpful, and willing to do everything in their power to help you. The down side is they can’t fix bugs, rewrite the app, or talk Samsung into adding more servers to their cloud so response times are better.nnSo while you see bashing, I see a product that I’ve spent many hundreds of dollars on to outfit my entire home, and had several days where I can’t even turn my lights on because of service outages and bugs. I’m honestly in shock that a class action lawsuit has not been issued against Samsung for this yet.

      Reply
      • As time has gone on, I’m more dissatisfied, but especially with their with support. They took a week to get back to me once. There are great holes in this for security. For example, many of my multi sensors had stopped providing open/close reports with no report from the system. I finally have gotten a pretty consistent result from the sensors, but if this aspect has issues, the system does not let me know. Therefore, kind of worthless: I have to keep opening and closing all of my windows and doors to know. nn The main problem that’s become apparent, is that this is beta software. The site should say it right up front and the system should therefor cost less. I can’t recall a tech company that responds in less than 24 hours, but not Smartthings. Another thing I’ve noticed (that you don’t see much nowadays) is that the company issues updates f’s it up every month vs improves the system. Especially with security, this is surprising they can’t get their act together. Samsung should double the resources to get this right. Litigation would ruin it for everyone, but maybe the company is using this fact for us to go through pain while they save money getting their market in order. They sure seem to spend money on promotion:https://twitter.com/hashtag/smartthings?f=images&vertical=default&src=hash

        Reply
        • I have a feeling their support team (like all their other teams) is under staffed, overwhelmed, and not getting the support they need from the company. When you have massive public failures like this and a product line that has gone off the rails the first thing you do if you choose not to pull the plug is bring in resources to fix things. But many moths have gone by, and as you mentioned their updates seem to break far more than they fix. nnI too have waited weeks to hear back from support, but when they are finally on the case they take action quickly. They replaced a motion sensor that I purchased off the SmartThings website which arrived dead (not a battery issue, but hardware failure) and they also sent me a replacement for my door sensor that is constantly detecting phantom knocks. I’m not sure how big their support team is, but given how bad their product is performing I imagine they are swamped. nnOne thing I have mentioned a lot in my communications with their support is that this product feels like a beta with how rough the app is and how badly their server infrastructure is handling the load. It’s interesting to see that I’m not alone in that though. nnAs a software/mechanical/electrical engineer I get that building products and services like this is challenging, and I would be much more tolerant of all these issues if they said this is a Beta or even acknowledged publicly that things are going horribly wrong. But rather than admitting that, they are plowing forward and spending a fortune on advertising and spending their time/effort on partnerships with other companies rather than getting their own house in order. Their developers should be making an all that works and fixing the servers, not integrating with some security company’s APIs/services.nnThe idea of tying home security to a product line like this that is barely functional at best and clearly built on an unstable, poorly designed, and non-scaling infrastructure is terrifying. nnThey honestly have their product setup to be so dependent on the cloud (without legitimate reason) that it can never work until they change that core aspect. nnFor example. Flipping a local switch, to communicate with my local hub, to turn on a local light, is an action on SmartThings that needs to send requests out to the cloud and await a response before action is taken. Unless I am using a web browser or my mobile device to issue commands there is no valid reason remote servers ever need to get involved. nnThis is a ridiculous dependency and a frequent point of massive failure in the product. nnThe hub is so badly designed that they have to use remote servers in the cloud as a crutch. That’s the only reason I can think that they want/need every action dependent on the cloud, other than data mining/snooping. nnHaving a product/service line with issues that behaves like a underperformant beta is one thing, but when that product/service is home automation its users are dependent on it for daily activities. When things go wrong there are serious consequences that the users can not avoid, escape, or simply wait out. nnWhen customers swap out all their lights and switches for SmatThings devices they are committing to the product/service in a major way. Samsung is not respecting or honoring that commitment. nnI spent 2 days using candles in a home that had electricity simply because all my lights and switches are tied to SmartThings and their system was having issues preventing the hub from connecting/functioning. nnAll day yesterday I triggered my alarm every time I opened the doors of my home because the app was stuck in “ARMED” mode and clicking “DISARM” was not working because the app was having connectivity issues. That app is a single point of failure that can take the whole system down. If it does not work, I can’t change security state. Most companies in that situation would be fixing the the app and updating their servers. But it’s been months and Samsung is asleep at the wheel. nnWe need to know they are working on these issues. We need to know they are aware how bad things are and how upset their customers are. But they have zero transparency and never provide updates or information to put us at ease. No progress is made, months go by and things are clearly getting worse at a steady pace, and we are all left high and dry. nn

          Reply
          • When customers swap out all their lights and switches for SmatThings devices they are committing to the product/service in a major way. Samsung is not respecting or honoring that commitment. nnnnAmen to that. It is major.

  8. $20 per month is way to expensive! I’ll dial 911 myself.

    Reply
  9. Ignore the complainers. There have been some bumps but overall the platform is excellent for home automation and security monitoring. Smartthings, when I try to sign up in the app for Scout monitoring, the promo says you must do 3 months. The only option I have is yearly or monthly (single month). How do I pick 3 months? If I go with the yearly, can I cancel with a refund for the unused portion if I decide I no longer want the service?

    Reply
  10. $20 a month is at least $10 too much for monitoring.

    Reply
  11. Really rather surprised to see so many people dis the SmartThings system. Mine has functioned flawlessly. If you’re into home automation, it also goes way beyond just security. If you have programming skills, it’s even better. For example, I wrote a routine to close the garage door after a certain amount of time if it is left open. (My wife has a seemingly unbreakable habit of driving off without closing the garage door.) Even so, this professionally monitoring does not seem worth it. If you don’t respond to the alarm after 90 seconds, they call WHO? Presumably, if you have an alert and have not responded to an alert, then you likely don’t have your phone. In which case, what good will it do to call you? I’d much rather have monitoring that will call the Police (without the 90 second delay, thank you). This would be great if you are out on hiking trip or just want to get away from your phone for a while.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Michael Kaminetz Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *