what a bummer.
thats really annoying, in my first year this wasn’t enforced by victron i could see all data for 12months
the more i use & learn about my victron products, the more shortcuts are visible to me
is there an alternative way to analyse long term data without using vrm?
Nobody sneaks into the cloud, they just use the products that are offered by victron - just a lame excuse.
So why is the 12 months button not removed yet, when its totally useless and misleading new users?
That is sadly incorrect. There are a large number of users who buy a PI, load mods and use third party grid meters and non-victron chargers and inverters because they like the VRM platform and the, usually cheap, products they have chosen don’t offer this.
It is enormously expensive to develop and maintain VRM, which is funded by product sales so it can remain a free service.
The 12 month button exists, because as already explained, there are views, like the dashboard which offer summarised views longer term.
There is a grafana bundle victron packaged which would allow far more detailed data to be kept locally for as long as you care to keep it.
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Some systems have 12 months on them.
Alot of solar system (other brands) online montoring does not offer more than 3 months (logged in 15 minutes intervals.) (i have other brands in the field.) some its not even a week except for big stats.
You can log locally it requires you set up your own custom database etc.
Google.it (or whatever you favourite search style is) you will find solutions.
Or you just download your more granular data periodically and store it that way.
And yes the platform supports alot of not victron data…
I will look into grafana if time permits, vrm-data analysis was one reason to choose victron products for me.
So to me it is still valid argument, victron is responsible that a “large number of users” are sneaking with their cheap products onto vrm. They could block them, but for some reason the don’t and use this as an excuse for their paying customers to limit and restrict the use of vrm data analysis.
I think last-12-month advanced data for paying customers isn’t to much to ask. I bet vrm will become a paying service in near feature, like many many other paywalls.
This was something I raised before, it is a little more difficult when you have made an “open” platform for people to help develop and integrate with, though that intent wasn’t for the effort to be piggybacked by 3rd party gear, and remember there are plenty of supported, complimentary 3rd party devices like PV inverters, BMS’s etc. So it is quite complicated and it starts cycle where you are continually trying to stop workarounds. There is no intention to be difficult, there has also been a lot of work to improve performance and scaling of the system.
VRM has grown massively, all this data sits in databases, and the bigger they are, the harder it is to scale, maintain and it demands more resources, so there will be some practical considerations as well. It’s not in Victron’s culture to implement anything without plenty of consideration. They really do try accommodate everyone as much as reasonably possible.
Ultimately, they are delivering on what is documented in the specs and manuals, unfortunately that doesn’t meet your expectations.
I bought victron products because of many reason, one was vrm data analysis. What other brands are doing or not is not the subject, nor a valid argument to me, you can excuse anything with such an argument.
Thank you Nick your reply, i understand how databases work, but i am still disappointed because of this limit, i thought it was just me or a temporally restriction on vrm, but i learned today it’s not.
I understand, I don’t think anyone would disagree that we would like to see as much data as possible for as long as possible. I am a self-confessed data geek. For my purposes no online system has the granularity I would like. I lost my last grafana deployment when I did a rebuild, so will install that again when I have the time.
last year(2024) i could see more than just the last 6-month on advanced, maybe i find a screenshot to proof it wasn’t just a dream, just my experience and that’s why i am disappointed yet
There has been a massive increase in users. (And then there are the pi users with zero victron gear - or maybe 1item- on there taking up space and that is a whole other issue).
Then the added features such as weather and forcasting, dess stuff . There are always going to be limitations for free services.
I too am a data stats person like nick. And have found ways to keep data longer.
Generally though at some point in granular become unimportant but the bigger stats are needed such as month on month production vs consumption.
LX don’t get me wrong, but as customer i don’t care whats behind the curtain.
It is victron decision to let all user “with their pi+cheap-non-victron-products” use their vrm cloud service for free and grant them the same service and limits as your paying customers with victron only products. Victron could limit/restrict the free user accounts and/or grant their paying customers little more premium service instead.
I have a warranty claim on batteries because of overvoltage and wanted to look into it what happened, now i have to process all my data on sd-card somehow to find out.
Will not bother you both again on this topic, need to process data i thought vrm could do it for me.
Is 6 months not long enough for that?
I am genuinely trying to understand under what circumstance you would need longer than that for troubleshooting; unless a problem was ignored for longer than that?
So if you do have a reason it would be a good viewpoint to know.
Alarm logs do go all the way to install beginning.
For what it is worth, I did query if retention changes were made, and there appears to have been no changes to what is/isn’t retained for the last 2 to 3 years or more.
Some datapoints are kept longer but most are, as expected, at 6 months.
Nothing further I can add to this, so will head for the door.
BTW, if Victron provided a download feature from the VictronConnect app, I wouldn’t even have to use a GX and VRM to get to the data, I would simply download it once a week or once a month when I get to my boat and archive it or analyze it on my laptop without having to add it to their cloud system.
As far as I can tell, Victron almost forces us to use their cloud, when the data is already present locally, just not directly accessible…
With some devices you can download the history via VictronConnect.
Others are just not designed to be able to store much historical data.
You can insert a USB stick or micro SD card into the GX device and it starts to logging on that (if you disconnect the internet connection).
Please keep in mind that the VRM portal is a FREE service.
Grafana was already mentioned in this thread, with that you can collect and store as much data as you want (also for free).
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