By Ethan Kim
Before I dive into listing all the reasons why claiming your customers’ control systems (and perhaps even your own) is going to make your life a whole lot better, let’s clarify some basics.
Crestron has two web-based tools under myCrestron naming:
- myCrestron RMS (Residential Monitoring Service): Web portal for the residential dealers
- myCrestron DDNS (Dynamic DNS): Dynamic DNS service that allows remote connection for ISPs that have dynamic public IP addresses.
Registering your customer’s control system in myCrestron DDNS is going to make your installation process a lot easier, too, but I want to focus this blog article on the myCrestron RMS.
If you know the below benefits already, that’s great. But hold tight and read on - you might find yourself learning something new.
1. Receive system status alerts and notificationsIf you’re using
Domotz® remote monitoring software in your installs, that’s great. Domotz will give you a holistic view of all products that are in your customer’s system.
If you are not able to use Domotz, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered with myCrestron Residential Monitoring Service (RMS).
By claiming your customer’s control system in your myCrestron RMS, you’re able to receive notifications when the control system has any status changes. You can set up your own alert rules and receive notifications via SMS text message and/or e-mail.
IMPORTANT TIP:
By default, you don’t receive notifications when the system comes ONLINE. If you want to receive ONLINE notifications, check out the video below!
2. Access to configuration backups and ability to restoreWe all wish things always work as expected. However, as we all know, the reality is far from ideal. With the help of cloud storage, long gone are the days that you must export the files and back them up in an external HDD storage.
With Crestron Home™ software, your configurations are backed up in a secure cloud storage whenever you make configuration updates. myCrestron RMS will store up to 500 configuration revisions.
So how do you use these backed up configurations?
1). You can revert to any of these backed up configuration revisions at any time from the Crestron Home Setup app. (
HOW-TO)
2). If the customer’s hardware needs to be replaced and you need to restore from the backed-up configuration, you can use the Deploy Code from myCrestron RMS to restore to one of the known configuration revisions. (
HOW-TO)
You can also download these configurations to your computer for local copy. Find out how you can navigate the feature from the below video.
3. View and download log files
The Crestron Home Setup app (XPanel) provides a great way to diagnose issues, but have you ever wanted to view the logs in a full desktop browser and be able to search through the logs quickly?
You can do that if you claim the control system in myCrestron RMS.
You can directly view and search for specific keywords from specific dates within the myCrestron RMS, or you can download the log file in a text format or an Excel® spreadsheet format to further comb through the log events.
4. Streamline your engraving orders 
If you’re ordering engravings from the Crestron Home™ Setup app (XPanel), then you must already be claiming your control systems in myCrestron RMS!
If not, you may be wondering why you never receive the engraving files when you press the Order Engraving button from the Crestron Home Setup app.
Make sure to claim your control system to receive the engraving files in your email. The email will be sent to your email address registered with Crestron.com.
TIP: You can open the engraving files from this email with the Engraver application if you need to make quick changes.
5. Create analytics widgets for better visibility into your customers’ systems
Once you claim the control systems, you will be able to create custom analytics graphs that give you a visual understanding of your customers’ systems, like below:
For example, I’m seeing that one of my devices, “Home CP4-R” has significantly higher reboot incidents than all other devices.
I can further drill down to see what the reboot history looks like monthly (or yearly, quarterly, daily) to find out if something is going wrong with this device.
Personally, I’ve been doing a lot of testing that requires device reboot, and that skews this data and graph. But if this was the trend in your customer’s system, then it’s probably a good indication that you should investigate further.
Remember that you can look at the logs of these devices from myCrestron RMS.
To find out how you can claim control systems, please watch the below video.
To access myCrestron RMS, please visit
here.