Does anyone know?
Is the custom monitors app, is it being turned off at the end of the month?
what is the custom monitors app? If it is a custom groovy smartapp, it will cease.
If you had rules within security/monitors in the old app, the rules were migrated over to the new app as “custom monitors”
However if you had already migrated SHM manually you missed out on this. This remains a sore point even though it didn’t really affect me.
However it is a good question so I’ll shut up now.
2 Likes
Does anyone have any info on the Custom Monitors? They used to be in SHM, then they moved them to their own smart app, and now the future is unknown.
I use the Custom Monitors to monitor high and low temperatures around my house. It is very important to me. Yes, you can say that I can just create routines to do what the custom monitors do, but there are two problems with that.
- I have 10 custom monitors which monitor temps and alert my if the temps are too low or too high. One custom monitor can execute either the high or low alert, telling me if the alert is for low temp or high temps. Turning them into routines means I have to create 20 routines because there is no way to put low and high temp alerts into one routine. The options for temps are matches, equal or above, equal or below, or range. You can’t choose more than one of those options.
- The alert from custom monitors gives me the actual temperature that triggered the alert in the notification. For example, the notification would say – Extreme temperature of 78.1 degrees is detected in the living room. Routines don’t do that.
Any info any has would be appreciated. Thanks.
1 Like
@lexis350
Same question,
Yes, that moving from monitors to new routines is a loss of functionality.
1 Like
I can now confirm that “Custom Monitors” no longer work under the new worse non-groovy environment. What a joke, they take away an extremely useful app and give you nothing to replace it with. Routines don’t cut it. Routines are too basic.
I now see it’s pretty clear that smartthings has essentially become the “home automation” system for a person that might have a couple smart lights, a TV, and a washer/dryer. The app is pretty useless for anything more advanced. I started on smartthings 6 years ago and newbies wouldn’t even believe the functionality they have lost from the good old days of ST. I used smartthtings on a windows 10 phone and it worked 1000 times better than the android or iOS apps. Guess it’s time to move on and let the people with basic home automation setups enjoy the crippled system.
1 Like
What feature of Custom Monitors are you looking for? (I never used it so i don’t know what it did.)
Edit: I see your previous message now, looking for the temperature range monitoring.
Perhaps SharpTools can provide the monitoring you’re looking for? It has a similar Rule Engine to do the range comparisons.
Considering that the whole IoT/SmartHome thing isn’t a growth product for them, I’m sure you can understand why. There’s no money in the hardware, and they didn’t charge anything for subscriptions or support. They bought in to ride the wave and it fizzled (on Samsung’s scale anyway), same as others experienced (Lowes Iris, Wink, etc). There clearly is a market, its just not big enough for world domination.
At this point they position it mostly as a front end for their smart appliances and TVs. The smarthome+hub portion comes along for free (although Edge had a pretty significant development cost, all to support 5+ year old hardware…)
Edge is also going to be their method for implementing Matter, so it has future value in that sense. 
1 Like
Yes, in the custom monitors notification it would tell you the current temp in the notification. With a routine I get alerted that the temp went above my limit, but then I have to open either the app, navigate to the sensor, and click it just to see the temp or open action tiles to see what the actual temperature is. The notifications in Custom Monitors were dynamic changing their message depending on the conditions. Routine notifications are static and don’t change with changing conditions.
I agree is just a front for their appliances. I have a Samsung smart tv and it’s in ST app, but it’s just easier to use the remote rather than the app.
I’ll check out SharpTools. I was trying to avoid using 6 different 3rd party services just to do what I could do yesterday in the ST app, but I’ll check them out and see what they have. I think I’ll check out hubitat too. I thought I read it’s more for complex setups, basic user need not apply lol. I currently have 63 devices and 53 routines to run them all. I need something that can handle all that. Thanks for the response.
1 Like
Hubitat is a great platform, but not perfect. There are pros and cons with everything. That being said it wouldn’t have any issue with 63 devices, most of them likely have a driver on the HE side that would work fine. A lot of people went with Hubitat as it supports webcore, which they had a significant time investment in.
Some people have switched “cold turkey” to another platform, often Hubitat. Some ran both either as a migration path or to take advantage of the best of both products. I run HE and ST in parallel. If you choose to run both (or to use as a migration) there are a couple tools that can assist in sharing devices between the two:
- HubiThings Replica allows you to mirror devices between HE and ST.
- Mira (my project) allows Hubitat devices to be mirrored back into ST.
1 Like
@csstup Thank you very much. I’d probably run them side by side to transition and maybe both together depending on what each can do. I run most of my lights and all my cameras within their own apps because the links between them and ST just don’t work well anymore, so I have no problem using multiple apps if I run both together. I’ll check out all the links and info you gave me. Much appreciated. I’m just frustrated, like many others, about the removal of features, not selling ST “things” anymore, lack of communication, and no real solutions to the features they removed. Instead, ST now seems focused on the person who will buy the Samsung refrigerator and show it off to their neighbor as a novelty rather than focusing on being a full home automation solution that no one even knows you have because it runs seamlessly behind the scenes. But anyway, thanks again.
1 Like
Just remember that if you try to run them side-by-side, you’ll have to think carefully about how to have a good backbone for each hub. One for Z wave, and one for Zigbee. That means having enough mains powered devices to create a path for messages to get from the most physically distant device back to the appropriate hub. I’ve seen quite a few people try to test out a new system and think it was terrible compared to the old one not realizing that they didn’t have a strong enough mesh to do a real evaluation. So just something to be aware of.
1 Like
Oh thanks for the tip. I do have a bunch of the original smartthings outlets that have a zigbee repeater in them and some zooz outlets which I think have zwave repeater, not positive would have to look that up. But I’ll be mindful of that and relocate plugs if needed to keep a good mesh going. Thanks.
1 Like