‎Urgent. Possible to get exact alarm notification age from offline system? | SimpliSafe Support Home
 
support7c86bd's profile

Tuesday, May 13th, 2025 2:53 PM

Urgent. Possible to get exact alarm notification age from offline system?

Hey SimpliSafe community, I really need your help with something urgent. We experienced a break-in, and the police are investigating, but we're struggling to get critical information from our system.

Our SimpliSafe base station was offline during the incident-it wasn't connected to Wi-Fi and didn't have a monitoring plan with cellular data, so it couldn't communicate with the outside world or dispatch police. However, it was still plugged into the wall and powered, acting only as a passive deterrent with its siren.

The keypad shows a notification that the alarm was triggered, and it displays a count-up clock telling us how old that notification is. For example, it might say the alarm went off three days ago instead of something more precise like 3 days, 22 hours, 51 minutes, and 37 seconds ago. It rounds up to whole seconds, minutes, hours, or days, so we can't get the exact age of the notification from this display alone.

We believe the base station must have internal logs or memory-maybe on an SD card or flash memory-storing the precise age of that notification, since it's clearly counting up and displaying it on the keypad.

The problem is, we can't access this data through the app or any external connection because the system was offline. I've already escalated this to SimpliSafe support and even contacted their headquarters, but I haven't gotten a clear answer. I'm convinced the information is there and extractable from the hardware.

This is critical for the police investigation, so we need to know: Is it possible to extract the exact age of the alarm trigger notification from the SimpliSafe base station or keypad when the system is offline but powered? And if so, how can we do it?

Has anyone successfully accessed these internal logs or found a way to offload this data? This isn't a false alarm or a fun trick-this is a real-world event, and we're desperate for answers. Any advice, experience, or technical know-how would be a huge help.

Please, if you have any insight, share it. Thanks so much in advance.

Official Solution

Community Admin

 • 

1.4K Messages

24 days ago

Hi @support7c86bd

 

We see that you have already gotten in touch with our Specialist team to discuss your case. Unfortunately if the Base Station was Offline and no timeline event was generated, this information cannot be recovered over on our end.

2 Messages

@simplisafe_admin

Local event logging is the process of recording system events, activities, or errors directly on a device’s internal storage, such as a security system’s base station or keypad, without relying on an internet connection or external servers. These logs capture details like timestamps, device status changes (e.g., armed/disarmed), sensor triggers, or connectivity issues in a file stored on the device itself.
For a system like SimpliSafe, local event logging would mean the base station saves a chronological record of all activities—e.g., when a door sensor was triggered or when the system went offline—on its hardware. This allows users to access critical data even if the system isn’t connected to WiFi or a cellular monitoring plan, which is useful for troubleshooting issues like break-ins or verifying event timelines.
Do you mean to say SimpliSafe hardware does NOT have local event logging in a logfile?
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