From ‘Camera Offline’ to Hard Drive Health: How Surveillance System Health Monitoring Lessens IT Burden 

Managing a surveillance system can cause a lot of headaches for IT departments, particularly if security blind spots ever occur due to a downed camera or recorder, leaving teams without video when they need it. If a security solution offers limited visibility into the functionality and current state of hardware and software, it can create these security and compliance risks due to system downtime or potential loss of critical surveillance video. 

Therefore, reliable health monitoring features in surveillance systems are essential for lessening this IT burden. By having visibility into the status of camera functionality, recorder storage, and other key hardware and software factors, IT teams can gain peace of mind and proactive insights, fixing small issues before they become serious security blind spots. 

This article will delve into how surveillance system health monitoring can alleviate this burden for more streamlined troubleshooting into issues while improving resource allocation during video security upkeep. 

Why Limited Visibility into Your Video Surveillance System is Troublesome for IT 

A video security system that offers limited to no visibility into its status and functionality leaves IT in a bind when it comes to system maintenance. A downed camera or a server that’s nearing its storage limits can affect the overall integrity of a security system. This puts IT teams in a troublesome spot, as often they’ll need to drop everything to go and solve the issue. Additionally, they’ll have to perform most of their troubleshooting on-site, which leaves them guessing as to what may be causing the video outage until they’re at the physical location itself. 

Security blind spots created by outages also threaten the security of the organization. If a camera or recorder is downed without any knowledge as to its status, teams can discover that a critical incident wasn’t recorded or a vital alert hadn’t been sent when needed. Additionally, limited IT availability also impacts how effectively teams can solve issues occurring at their video security system. The expertise of IT teams and the complexity of the systems they work with makes every hour of their day valuable as they seek to solve issues and streamline processes. 

To accommodate these problems, IT teams need a solution that gives them complete visibility into the status of their hardware to ensure cameras and recorders are functioning properly. By leveraging a system that enables streamlined, proactive troubleshooting, IT departments can save valuable time during maintenance, which they can then devote to innovating operations for their organization. 

How Health Monitoring Lessens IT Burden and Improves Operations 

A cloud-managed video system with health monitoring provides enhanced visibility into camera and recorder functionality, enabling proactive response for resolving issues. 

With surveillance system health monitoring, IT teams can easily manage the health of their security video. In cases where repairs are needed, alerts can be configured so IT teams can remedy the issue before it ever becomes a noticeable problem. These powerful alerts can notify teams to situations that may be affecting your hardware’s ability to record and store video. 

IT teams can additionally leverage a range of comprehensive reports, including System Summary, Storage Retention, Inventory, and Day/Night reports. Each of these reports offer a unique angle of insight into the functionality of your system, allowing businesses to check the requisite boxes to ensure their video security is active and recording. 

Finally, by using a cloud-managed system, IT or security teams can respond to situations remotely. In some cases, this may enable the team to fix the issue without having to drive out and check on the camera or recorder. If on-site maintenance is needed, the cloud platform will equip your team with the information they need to drive out and solve the problem quickly as opposed to guessing what may be affecting the hardware and making several trips. 

Health Alerts 

Critical system health events can plague IT departments with unexpected, sudden, or unknown disruptions to camera or recorder functionality. Solving this issue requires a means of proactively alerting your team to any pending issues that need addressing before they threaten the integrity of the camera system. 

With health alerts, you can respond to any issues with your system by receiving alert notifications. Health alerts help identify when something is affecting the ability of hardware to capture or record video. This includes hard drive error, connection lost to camera, abnormal restarts, and recorders not recording/responding. By receiving this information when the event takes place, teams will be able to work to resolve the issue before it becomes a bigger problem. 

System Summary Reports

Health alerts are a powerful tool for responding to issues affecting camera and recorder functionality in the moment. When combined with system summary reporting options, IT teams can unlock greater visibility into their system and be better equipped to confront health issues.  

System summary reports offer the ability to quickly see how recorders are functioning at a glance, ensuring that problems are dealt with in a timely manner. These reports allow you to easily review health data for each recorder, including storage retention. By keeping an eye on the status of your system, IT can proactively solve issues to ensure their video surveillance is functioning properly. 

Storage Retention Alerts 

Storage is a vital aspect of system functionality. If your recorders are at their limit and aren’t recording new footage or deleting vital video to make room on the server, your entire business could be without crucial video needed for a variety of instances, whether that’s providing evidence to law enforcement, use in an insurance claim, or to be sent to other parties within your organization. Additionally, if your company isn’t storing video for the required number of months or days, you could be at risk for noncompliance, which often involves costly penalties. 

Storage retention alerts ensure specific cameras aren’t falling below the set limits needed for your organization. By leveraging storage retention alerts, IT teams won’t find themselves without video from days or weeks ago that’s needed for the goals of your organization. 

Inventory Reports 

When managing all your organization’s devices, you’ll need a solution that can help you quickly see which cameras and recorders are up to date and functioning properly. Unfortunately, if you need to manually check each device and roll out updates individually, this process can be immensely time-consuming and inconvenient. By using inventory reports, you can more easily ensure your hardware is up to date and meeting business needs. 

Inventory reports list detailed information on all recorders and cameras, such as current software or firmware version, frame rate settings, and average days of recorded video. Leveraging a platform that enables automated software updates can help alleviate additional burden associated with rolling out updates across devices as well. 

Day/Night Reports 

In the case of an investigation, it can be frustrating to discover the only video you have of an incident is obscured by cobwebs, leaves, overgrown branches, or pointed in the wrong direction. To help solve this problem, IT teams can take advantage of day/night reports, providing an easy way to identify changes to a camera’s field of view due to dirt, branches, or other image issues to ensure you have video when you need it. Day/night reports show a day and night image from each camera and compare that to a reference image for each.

These reports can be checked at a glance to ensure that a camera’s line of sight isn’t blocked or malfunctioning. If something is affecting a camera, action can be taken proactively to address the issue to make sure your organization has the video it needs while helping IT teams pinpoint the exact camera that’s affected to save time during maintenance. 

Reduce IT Burden with OpenEye Web Services’ Health Monitoring Features 

By working with the right platform, IT teams can rest easy with proactive alerts and complete reporting tools to get ahead of system issues and deal with maintenance quickly and efficiently. 

OpenEye Web Services’ (OWS) real-time health monitoring functions keep you abreast of critical issues and potential problems with your video system including pending hard drive failure, changes in recording retention, network outages, and camera failure or tampering. Our powerful cloud-managed video platform enables you to keep up to date on the status of your entire surveillance infrastructure with instant alerts and scheduled reports delivered on a weekly or monthly basis, including Health Alerts, System Summary Reports, Storage Retention Alerts, Inventory Reports, and Day/Night Reports. 

Interested in seeing how OWS can give your organization greater peace of mind? Book a demo with OpenEye today to learn more.