Can someone talk to me about the differences between using the Smart Home Monitor option vs setting up a dashboard item group (say all your motion sensors) and getting notifications that way?
I realize SHM (I’m just being lazy now) has video options, but I already have motion notifications when we are away from the house (any “away” mode).
I’m guessing I’m missing something big…perhaps it is the wine clouding my judgement. 
Well, The first big thing is that the dashboard groups are no longer supported as of mobile app 2.0. If you have some left over from before, you can still use them until you have removed the last device. But you will not be able to add any new ones, and you will not be able to re-add them once they disappear. So that’s a pretty big deal.
On the positive side, the SHM is integrated using the arm/disarm concept which means you can have your “routine” like "good night "or “I’m back” set the arm/disarm status. That’s pretty cool, and gives you a lot of options.
On the negative side, The SHM is not at all intuitive. I still can’t figure out why it keeps telling me everything is OK at the same time it keeps telling me that there’s a gate open.
I have a notification set up for that gate, and it is working to send me a notification that the gate is open. So why is everything “OK”?
JD, what am I missing? If Dashboard groups are being depreciated, I will have to use/find straight up SmartApps instead? I realize that the groups were pretty much like SmartApps (I assume they used the same backend).
I must have missed all this in the announcements. Crap…falling behind here! 
I also often ran into an issue where it would show that a door was unlocked, but when I went into the group all the doors were locked. When you went back to the root level, sometimes it would change to reflect that and other times it wouldn’t. So, it has always been a little flakey.
@JDRoberts, I just tried something to debug tons of new notifications I was getting all of a sudden from ALL my motion sensors, even though I did not turn on notifications.
I saw a new In Use SmartApp for one of my motion sensors that I haven’t seen before called Motion Alerts, and it was linked to the Motion Dashboard and the area I set up. When I set it up originally, I did not set it up for any notifications. All I wanted to do was have it in the Dashboard.
As soon as I deleted that area in the Motion Dashboard, I stopped getting notifications. Great! Then I’m beginning to say to myself what had I done to myself, and can I add it back in?
Sure enough, yes you can, thank goodness!
The SHM for me will be just something to watch and see how it develops. I’ll only play around with the Security part, and all the other Smoke, Leaks, Motion, etc will stay in my original Dashboards.
@brianlees, did you remove any Dashboards?
You’re supposed to replace the old Dashboard groups with:
Rooms
Smart Lights (for the old shortcut groups kinds of rules)
Smart Home Monitor (for the old notification and alerts)
See this page:
https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205379774
And this one:
https://support.smartthings.com/hc/en-us/articles/205379644
Read carefully and make no assumptions. There are a lot of twists.
As always with anything new! Always good rules to live by…
I did not yet. Cautiously approaching the new…and I’m always a big fan of new!
I’m considering just starting completely from scratch when Hub v2 arrives at my door.
It looks like Smart Lights is a less sophisticated version of the awesome Lighting Director, which I have several instances of. Seems like they should have just used that instead.
Yes, and change can be good. ST is saying in those articles that JD posted that “you can expect new SmartApps to restore these functionalities soon.”. I hope so, and when they do I’ll gradually move away from the old Dashboards.
Auto correct?
Deprecated:
In other words… Dang… Deleting a somewhat useful feature!
Nope…correct term here! 
Although, I don’t think it is neither good nor bad that they are being depreciated. Just being replaced with an alternative. Hopefully, they can flush out a lot of options. Need to play with this more. I can see a potential option to use one of my motion sensors still sitting in a box and the outlet module I’m getting with my v2. Perhaps a good option for v2 in the beginning is to have a sandbox to play around with a few devices and all the new features.
Deprecated.
(Depreciation is a financial term 
).
Peace! phase out. it’s both technical and financial.
No it isn’t.
They are two different words with different meanings. Unfortunately, many people conflate the two, saying “depreciated” when they actually mean “deprecated”.
This was the point of @tgauchat’s posts.
Another big difference: in the previous versions of the app, you had to use mode to distinguish between when your alarms were set and when they weren’t.
With smart home monitor, we have a new variable (I’m not sure what it’s actually called) that indicates the arm state for the alert monitoring. It has three valueS: armed away, armed stay, and disarmed.
This means the alert monitoring status could be “armed stay” and your mode could be home, or night, or baby sleeping, or movie night or whatever mode you use. And the modes can change independently of the alarm status.
That may take some getting used to, but I do think it’s a significant improvement over the previous versions. 
Looking at the installed app properties, it’s solution level (or perhaps location or Account global) Events / Attributes called: alarmSystemStatus.away, .stay, .off.
You would hope, for the sake of SmartThings users with holiday homes everywhere, that it is location based and not account global.
You wouldn’t want your main home back in the city going into disarmed mode just because you’ve come back to your holiday cottage after a swim at the local beach…
I suspect it is location based in an indirect way - i.e. each location will automatically get an instance of the Smart Home Monitor smartapp deployed for it, and each of those app instances is maintaining its own state.
I’ve just checked my own set up and, though I have two locations defined, only one of them has Smart Home Monitor deployed to it; that location, however, is the only location where I have a hub. The second location (which I use for presence tracking via iPhone geolocation), has neither hub nor Smart Home Monitor.
It could be that Smart Home Monitor will only be deployed to locations with an associated hub, or it could be that they are still rolling Smart Home Monitor out and it hasn’t reached my second location yet. (The former approach makes sense in a number of ways, not least of which is restricting functionality to those who have actually purchased a hub 
)
I know, I know. Was just a joke I was suggesting ‘phase out’ because it’s both financial & technical…
Seeing the same thing. I have v1 hub and a v2 hub at different locations. Only the v1 hub is displaying SHM. On the IDE I can see the v2 hub location has these under installed apps:
Solutions:
Damage & Danger
Doors & Locks
Home & Family
Lights & Switches
Lights & Switches
Motion
However none of these are displayed in the app when v2 hub location is selected. The dashboard is blank and has a notification on android devices “you do not have any solutions yet”; IOS devices does not have any notification just blank screen.
