Who Monitors Your VMS?

Plan ensures that failure is not an option

It’s 2 a.m. There’s a disturbance at your high school campus. Windows are broken, computers are stolen, and by the time the authorities arrive there’s no sign of the intruders. That’s OK. You’ll have video of the criminals. In fact, the footage will be crystal clear and irrefutable because you invested thousands of dollars in a high-tech IP video surveillance system. Your system has been configured for weeks of storage and with cameras placed at every angle near the incident. You know you have great images.

However, when you go to retrieve the video, you discover there is none. The server linking all of the cameras in that section of the building shut down for a system update and never restarted. It’s not the VMS’s fault—it was working properly. It’s not the cameras’ fault—they worked, as well. To avoid this costly and frustrating scenario, users should invest in the ultimate technical support with a Customer Assurance Plan (CAP) like the one pioneered by Video Insight.

“Implementing a video surveillance system is an integral step in your overall security program,” said Tom Nell, Video Insight director of technical services. “But if you don’t proactively monitor the performance of your system, then you can’t be sure that it is operating at full capacity.”

Video Insight developed CAP to proactively monitor the status of your VMS—servers, cameras and connections—ensuring you know when something isn’t working properly and preventing the scenario described above. Of course, a product like Video Insight comes with technical support for issues that arise and that are linked to the performance of the software. But, as an added feature, CAP provides a dedicated specialist who monitors the operation of your system to ensure it is always working properly, and, if not, to diagnose the problem— determining, for example, when the system went down and if was caused by a switch, power failure or something else.

“A program like CAP is essential because, number one, it maintains the integrity of your system, but it also provides a level of support not available to many overtaxed or understaffed IT departments, particularly in industries such as school districts and colleges that continue to face serious budget issues,” Nell said.

How CAP Works

The key factor behind the success of CAP is having a dedicated technology specialist personally review a customer’s system status daily. This is done in conjunction with three important elements in the Video Insight software:

Health monitor. The health monitor runs as a service in the background and monitors the receipt of messages from other servers to ensure server uptime and reporting of any issues affecting the servers or cameras. The health monitor can be configured to send email alerts to the appropriate individual if messages from the servers are not received within a predetermined time frame. Servers also send messages to the health monitor on camera operation and disk storage usage.

Monitor station. The monitor station is the primary user interface in the product suite. From an end user perspective, it provides centralized viewing of live and recorded images from any server. System and security administrators use the monitor station to setup and configure all servers and cameras from a central location.

With CAP, the monitor station also shows the status of servers that are active. Inactive servers are indicated by a red dot. Users also can view and access the health monitor, indicated by a red cross.

Server statistics. The dedicated CAP specialist also can evaluate system status by viewing server statistics. These provide vital information regarding the server status, camera status, storage, licensing and a list of current online users. For example, server statistics can tell you when data from the camera was last written, giving a true picture of how the cameras are working and what data has been saved. An important element of server statistics is accessibility from any machine that has the VI monitor station installed.

CAP-plus. A proactive monitoring program such as CAP is a welcome service for those who, due to budget constraints or thinly spread IT professionals, don’t have the capability to ensure that the full functionality of their video management system is being properly monitored and delivered. But what happens when there is an issue that can’t be fixed remotely by a CAP specialist?

In addition to CAP, Video Insight offers CAP-Plus, a service providing a technician— oftentimes consisting of a trusted partner systems integrator in the vicinity of the enduser—to make the necessary repair. Of course, prior to a technician deployment, the CAP specialist will make every effort to quickly resolve issues remotely. If the issue is caused by failed hardware, the technician will replace the hardware with a functioning unit, provided the hardware was purchased from Video Insight and is under warranty during the time of the service call.

This article originally appeared in the November 2012 issue of Security Today.

Featured

  • Integration Imagination: The Future of Connected Operations

    Security teams that collaborate cross-functionally and apply imagination and creativity to envision and design their ideal integrated ecosystem will have the biggest upside to corporate security and operational benefits. Read Now

  • Smarter Access Starts with Flexibility

    Today’s workplaces are undergoing a rapid evolution, driven by hybrid work models, emerging smart technologies, and flexible work schedules. To keep pace with growing workplace demands, buildings are becoming more dynamic – capable of adapting to how people move, work, and interact in real-time. Read Now

  • Trends Keeping an Eye on Business Decisions

    Today, AI continues to transform the way data is used to make important business decisions. AI and the cloud together are redefining how video surveillance systems are being used to simulate human intelligence by combining data analysis, prediction, and process automation with minimal human intervention. Many organizations are upgrading their surveillance systems to reap the benefits of technologies like AI and cloud applications. Read Now

  • The Future is Happening Outside the Cloud

    For years, the cloud has captivated the physical security industry. And for good reason. Remote access, elastic scalability and simplified maintenance reshaped how we think about deploying and managing systems. But as the number of cameras grows and resolutions push from HD to 4K and beyond, the cloud’s limits are becoming unavoidable. Bandwidth bottlenecks. Latency lags. Rising storage costs. These are not abstract concerns. Read Now

  • Right-Wing Activist Charlie Kirk Dies After Utah Valley University Shooting

    Charlie Kirk, a popular conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA, died Wednesday after being shot during an on-campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah Read Now

New Products

  • 4K Video Decoder

    3xLOGIC’s VH-DECODER-4K is perfect for use in organizations of all sizes in diverse vertical sectors such as retail, leisure and hospitality, education and commercial premises.

  • Luma x20

    Luma x20

    Snap One has announced its popular Luma x20 family of surveillance products now offers even greater security and privacy for home and business owners across the globe by giving them full control over integrators’ system access to view live and recorded video. According to Snap One Product Manager Derek Webb, the new “customer handoff” feature provides enhanced user control after initial installation, allowing the owners to have total privacy while also making it easy to reinstate integrator access when maintenance or assistance is required. This new feature is now available to all Luma x20 users globally. “The Luma x20 family of surveillance solutions provides excellent image and audio capture, and with the new customer handoff feature, it now offers absolute privacy for camera feeds and recordings,” Webb said. “With notifications and integrator access controlled through the powerful OvrC remote system management platform, it’s easy for integrators to give their clients full control of their footage and then to get temporary access from the client for any troubleshooting needs.”

  • QCS7230 System-on-Chip (SoC)

    QCS7230 System-on-Chip (SoC)

    The latest Qualcomm® Vision Intelligence Platform offers next-generation smart camera IoT solutions to improve safety and security across enterprises, cities and spaces. The Vision Intelligence Platform was expanded in March 2022 with the introduction of the QCS7230 System-on-Chip (SoC), which delivers superior artificial intelligence (AI) inferencing at the edge.