Understanding Zone Followers

[GrandWizard]

Zone followers are a slightly different class of Envisalert events that allow a user to select a "special" zone within their home/business to be alerted-on upon its change in state, regardless of the arming state of the security panel.

Examples would include alerts regarding a gun-locker being accessed or a walk-in freezer in a commercial restaurant, regardless of the state of the system.

These alerts are generated by the Eyezon servers for free, as an added benefit to our users. However, while this is free to our customers, it does not come without a cost to Eyezon. These zone follower alerts now account for 90% of all traffic to our servers.

To keep this traffic manageable, and to allow Eyezon to continue providing our customers with complete system control and emergency alerts for FREE, we must limit zone followers to one (1) zone per system. Envisalerts+ subscribers are allowed to select multiple zones as part of their standard package.

In addition, we have imposed an alerting window of 5 minutes whereby any zone faulted or restored will not be reported until 5 minutes have passed since the last report. For example, if you open a door the event will be reported immediately, and if you then close the door, this event will not be reported until the window has expired, 5 minutes later. Any zone faults/restores during the intervening 5 minute period are ignored.

Zone Followers are further bandwidth limited to two (2) transmissions per minute. Other openings that happen during that time will be queued-up for later delivery, once every 30 seconds. For example, if you opened two doors in your home simulataneously, you would receive one door reported immediately, the other 30 seconds later.

It is considered against the acceptable use of the Envisalerts service to place a zone follower on a high traffic zone like a motion detector (PIR) or noise detector.

These traffic management priciples help us keep the service available for the benefit of all users.

[GrandWizard]

HONEYWELL VISTA USERS

Unfortunately zone followers do not work when the panel is in the ARMED STAY(NIGHT) state. That is, if you have internal zones that trip when the system is armed, they will not be reported to the Envisalink, and hence we cannot report them to you.

[GrandWizard]

For those users who want to log all of their zone traffic themselves, without using Zone Followers, have a look at the Envisalink 4's Syslog Client instead.