I have a Nest Doorbell with a built-in camera—and I love it!

I can see the postal worker bring my mail and packages. I can see when friends or family drop by. I can even check on my front yard while I’m traveling across the world. But I’ll be honest: I used to find it incredibly annoying.

Why? Because the app connected to the doorbell would send me an alert every single time someone walked by on the sidewalk—which was basically every few minutes.

It was too much. All noise, no signal.

Eventually, I adjusted the settings so that it would only notify me of activity right in front of the door. That simple change completely transformed the experience. Suddenly, I was only getting alerts that mattered.

That right there, ladies and gentlemen, is the difference between active monitoring and reactive monitoring.

So, what is Active Monitoring?

Let’s start with what it’s not.

Active monitoring is not knowing that one of your panels is producing 1.8% less than the one next to it.

It’s not getting a comms alert because the inverter hasn’t checked in for the past 12 hours.

It’s not finding out in September that your August production was 10% below the original model.

And here’s a hot take:

Active monitoring is not being notified of anything that doesn’t impact the system’s ability to meet long-term production expectations.

If you’re being flooded with alerts that don’t tie back to meaningful performance or system health, you’re stuck in reactive monitoring mode.

Reactive Monitoring: When Everything Becomes a Problem

Reactive monitoring is chasing noise instead of focusing on the signal.

It’s when you get pinged every time someone walks down the sidewalk. It’s when customers call because Panel 12 dipped in production by 3% (likely from a shadow, some bird poop, or a passing cloud.) It’s when your team wastes valuable time investigating non-issues.

If you confuse reactive monitoring with active monitoring, you’re not just annoying your customers—you’re driving up costs.

You’re increasing the number of service tickets that don’t need to exist.

You’re pulling your team—sales, project managers, electricians, you name it—into conversations about alerts that ultimately don’t matter.

You’re slowing down your ability to serve the customers who actually need help.

It’s Time to Shift the Focus

Imagine if every HVAC company installed live monitoring on every AC unit—and then had customers calling daily because the internal temperature or coefficient of performance shifted slightly with the weather.

That’s the absurdity we’ve enabled by letting solar customers obsess over minute-by-minute panel-level data.

So what does matter?

• That you’re on track to meet your annual production goals, accounting for weather and natural degradation.
• That your system is online and available, with no major faults.
• That there are no active safety or workmanship issues.
• That your installer will stand by you when it’s time to process an RMA.

Everything else? Just noise.

10 Ways to Prioritize Active Monitoring Today

Here are ten things you can do right now to steer your company toward true active monitoring:

1. Prepare a snow-day email (or send a Sunvoy broadcast) to let customers know production will be near zero during snow cover—and that’s totally normal.
2. Set expectations early: Tell customers that what really matters is year-over-year production. If they’re underproducing significantly, you’ll reach out with solutions. If they’re overproducing, you’ll ask for referrals.
3. Train your team—especially inside Sales and O&M—on what warrants a service ticket and how to handle "false alarm" alerts with empathy and clarity.
4. Prioritize by performance: Start each day by identifying underperforming systems, and dispatch your O&M techs smartly—clustered by area code using tools like Sunvoy’s Fleet Map to cut down on drive time and double productivity.
5. Build a self-service FAQ in your app so customers can troubleshoot on their own before reaching out.
6. Turn on Sunvoy’s comms alerts (like “Envoy Not Reporting”) so customers can be proactively notified and try to fix it themselves—cutting ticket volume in half.
7. Push your own monitoring app, not the manufacturer’s, so you can avoid the chaos of panel-level monitoring and control the narrative.
8. Send proactive production summaries—quarterly or annually—so customers know their system’s on track and don’t need to check it every day.
9. Automate shortfall reimbursements for production guarantees, so customers aren’t left wondering (or emailing) if they’re getting paid.
10. Use referral tools like Sunvoy’s upcoming payout feature and branded referral pages, so your customers focus on bonuses—not dirty panels or minor comms blips.

Final Thoughts

The promise of solar is that it’s clean, reliable, and increasingly affordable. But we can't achieve that if we let reactive monitoring inflate costs and overwhelm teams with false alarms.

By focusing on actual performance and actual system health, we not only make our lives easier—we create a better customer experience, build more trust, and help accelerate the transition to solar energy.

So let’s stop reacting.

Let’s start monitoring what really matters.

What do you think? Does this resonate with how your company approaches monitoring?

We’d love to hear your thoughts.