Anyone Has Any Feedback On Viakoo?

When we tried this about a year ago, it didn't work out.

1. Very little custom or manual configuration. It tries to set itself up automatically, but still ends up missing things, like cameras, and you don't have any way to manually add them.

2. Getting email alerts was problematic, sometimes or often did not get them.

3. Sometimes the system status shown in the portal was not consistent with the camera status. One shows green while the other red.

4. Some inconsistencies between what sales said and tech support said about if devices that don't support SNMP, like switches, could be monitored. Eventually determined they could not.

I've listed these individually in case someone from Viakoo wants to comment on any of them. Maybe they have since addressed some or all of these issues.

Full disclosure: I built Viakoo. Add whatever seasoning you want to my response.

Viakoo's design center has always been to be a solution for people managing physical security networks, making it easy to discover, diagnose and resolve problems with their infrastructure. It has a lot of sophisticated capabilities in order to help people ranging from auto-discovery of the configuration to focusing only on issues that affect or might affect the application.

We have been evolving this system for four years now. It isn’t omniscient but we are making it more sophisticated, capable and easier to use all the time. Moreover, all our customers benefit from these improvements with every fresh release. We're not perfect but our renewals are over 90%. 

That said, I want to respond to Undisclosed Integrator #2 (UI2) and I will try not to make this too much of a product pitch.

Item 1: Missing cameras

This experience is pretty unusual. There are only a few scenarios that might have given him this experience which might explain this.

Viakoo is designed to discover IP-based devices talking to applications. It also leverages application specific information that is discoverable on the servers. It does not discover and monitor Analog cameras that are directly connected to DVRs. It can support IP-Encoders connected to multiple Analog cameras but it thinks of the Encoder as a multi-stream camera. SNMP data may give us separate channel information but that is the extent we can “see” an Analog camera.

Also, if the camera is UNUSED, we don’t make it visible. At one point, would discover any camera that might be within LANs or may have historically talked to a given recorder but we found that this just created a lot of “dead camera” entries that users would have to clean up. If a camera is disabled for recording by the VMS, we will show the video stream as “UNUSED” and it will be hidden by default. A simple checkbox can make those UNUSED cameras visible.

Additionally, the system only shows you information associated with your current navigational scope. You can view all the cameras for an entire company, a region in your company, a site or a single recorder. If your current context is a recorder and a camera is recording to another recorder, it won’t show up on that recorder’s list.

Finally, our lower-end product is just tickets (problems) and overview. Detailed configuration information like lists of cameras, camera reports require our Preemptive product. I’m not sure what product UI2 was trying but it may have been our “Free Monitor” product which didn’t expose these tools.

Item 2: Alert Emails

Beyond the user interface, the system can alert you through emails or through push notifications to your phone. UI2’s experience could be associated with two problems we’ve seen from users: aggressive SPAM filters or priority settings not being correct.

Some email systems treat our alert emails as potential SPAM. If you use GMail, these emails don’t even show up in your SPAM folders. In those cases, it is necessary to whitelist our system’s email address either through explicit configuration or just adding Viakoo to your contacts (gmail). You can also download the phone app to get push-notifications.

Our alerting avoids bombarding you with unimportant information as much as possible. Not all tickets (problems) are at “Alert-level.” We prioritize problems as FAILURE, CRITICAL, WARNING and ADVISORY. We only treat the top two severity levels as ALERTS. In order to give users some control, for cameras, they get alerted only from those cameras that get elevated to “CRITICAL” priority level.  This fall, we will release capabilities to give users even more control over what levels of severity and, even, which problems they want to get alerted on. However, the current version only works as described.

Finally, this may also be a consequence of UI2 evaluating our low-end offering (e.g., Viakoo “Free Monitor”) which wouldn’t give him this level of control.

Item 3: Inconsistent Status between configuration and Viakoo

Historically, we’ve had issues with cameras whose recording video streams would move between servers. Some VMS's make this pretty easy to do. However, as recently as a year ago, if users migrated a camera’s recording from one server to another, we would see it as FAILED on the original recorder. We have an “HA-Mode” configuration feature if you know you want to record to two servers (ACTIVE-ACTIVE) or an automatic failover configuration (ACTIVE-PASSIVE) which would cause the system to react appropriately. However, a fairly common use case, users want to just “rebalance" (i.e., move from recording in one server to recording in another server). This past year, we added mechanisms to automatically detect this behavior and mark items as having been “MOVED” or “REMOVED” in appropriate cases, reducing the amount of misleading or just noisy information that required clean-up.

The other thing is that if cameras have other issues (e.g., not making their retention goals), they may not be reflecting “OKAY” status. Hovering the mouse over the status icon can pop-up a message indicating why the status is whatever color it is.

Item 4: Switches and other devices

Users who want us to include switches in their configuration can add them into the collection. We only monitor switches by collecting their SNMP stats through the management port. If a sales rep represented that we could monitor unmanaged switches that don’t support SNMP, then I’m sorry for the misrepresentation. That is a limitation with today's system.

We are working on a facility to allow for arbitrary devices to be monitored. These can be SNMP-based or just simple PING monitoring. We expect that capability to be available later this year.

Summary, without a direct follow-up with UI2, I can’t know for sure what his scenario was. It isn't the norm and I’m sorry he had a bad experience. If it isn't too much of an inconvenience, I would welcome him to write to me directly as it would be useful for us to know his specifics. We spend a lot of time listening to our customers and are always looking to improve.

We looked at Viakoo but decided to use PRTG and Connectwise automate.  Viakoo let us monitor the cameras and VMS but we couldn't monitor UPS, access points, and other SNMP devices.  Also with Connectwise Automate not only can we monitor events but we can also remote control and setup scripts to automate troubleshooting tasks. 

Viakoo is an Intransa spinoff company after Intransa shut their doors. That's about all I know about it. 

I tried to use them for an issue that I was having and I did not have a good experience.  After a $1000 bill for their work, they couldn't find what was causing some issues on my network.  Simply not worth the investment.

Just recently got a newsletter from Viakoo. Part of the letter had this to say..

Recently released - Viakoo version 2.16. In this release, we introduce IoT Tracker, where IP-based devices can be added to Viakoo to detect and report on their status (such as turnstiles or uninterruptible power supplies), a number of UI improvements, and additional improvements.

Sounds like they are expanding some functions to overcome the limitations other people have commented on.

Yes, IoT Device Tracking allows for you to add any IP connected devices which would have addressed some of the above complaints. 

There are two categories for now: PING and SNMPv2. For SNMP devices, you can pull any OIDs you want. The returning values can be tagged to show up in the Performance graphs or as attributes in the IoT Devices table. Performance parameters can then be used to set thresholds. 

This mechanism would have allowed UI2 to monitor unmanaged switches or add cameras that weren't showing up in the configuration. However, in the case of the cameras not showing up, there was likely something correctable going on. Either those cameras were never configured in our we had a bug in his VMS driver that we needed to fix.

SNMPv3 and other protocols are in the roadmap.

I personally prefer PRTG and SolarWinds, but to each there own. Viakoo was really easy to setup, but as UI2 mentioned it is not prefect and there is no easy way to correct for the devices the software misses.