Do you monitor sites of your clients?
What do you pay attention to?
How do you see ideal health monitoring feature?(high level)
Subscriber Discussion
To Integrators: Health Monitoring
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Aug 11, 2016UI
Undisclosed Integrator #2
Aug 11, 2016What are you looking to monitor?
Yes, we monitor site health.
At a previous employer we utilized Milestone Dashboard to real time monitor VMS errors. Don't do that unless you like being inundated with false errors. Until the product improves, which it will over time, the noise is greater than the value. However, it is free if your SUP is current and your time is valued at $0.
What do we pay attention to? The primary items we monitor are system crippling items or that function as a prelude to catastrophe.
Ideal feature: have the ability to monitor everything but only utilize what is relevant.
IPVM has articles on SNMP which is a much better, though possibly more costly route. The fact that it's monitoring more than just reports from within the VMS is incredibly valuable. With a little work and some standardization I was able to use PRTG to tell me if a CPU was being overtaxed (something is dreadfully wrong), verify that a single drive in a RAID array failed (VMS dashboards will not catch this), one PSU failure in a redundant setup, verify network utilization, etc. If you're working to deliver on an SLA, something like this would be the way to go.
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Aug 11, 2016Thank you!
What we have in mind:
At any given moment you can see the list of systems(you installed and/or assigned to monitor) and their healthy status ( green, yellow, orange and red ).
Green - system has no major issues.
Yellow - means, in general, all ok, but there is something to improve( some cameras have relatively big packet loss, non enought HDD speed sometimes, CPU usage above normal etc ).
Orange - needs attention. ( something like HDD in RAIDfailed or about to fail, redundant server is down, cameras went offline too much etc ).
Red - system does not work ad designed( storage failed, camera(s) connection lost permanently etc).
Again, you can see the list of the systems and their status.
You also can get detailed information for each system including such details as if camera has newer firmware.
Of cause, you can have e-mail notification while system goes from one state to another.
This is a general idea for our second attempt. (We already have some sort of health monitoring, but I do not find it very useful. )
Mark Kirkeby
Aug 12, 2016I use the Health Monitor baked into Video Insight, I do not get any "spam" from the system, daily reports can be overwhelming , just I only use the error reporting, VMS offline, or Camera offline,this allows me to be very proactive with clients
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Aug 12, 2016How many sites do you need to monitor on average?
How much time does it take to per site( if it's doing OK).
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Aug 12, 2016Mark Kirkeby
Aug 12, 2016I monitor about 15 VMS's , I spend no time per site, if an email comes in I review it
Here is a sample daily report (daily report will have all servers and status)
Server:XXXXXXX Hawkeye
Minutes since report:3
Cameras Up: 19
Cameras Down: 1
Here is a sample camera offline email
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Jul 9
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Error: The following camera is not responding in a timely manner:Mountain Lion-2
if a server goes offline it will generate 2 notifications 30 min and 60 min
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Jul 28
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Server : *********** Hawkeye is not responding in a timely manner.
Last sent message was received 31 minutes ago.
Warning condition is set for 30 minutes
Error condition is set for 60 minutes
Last sent message was received 31 minutes ago.
Warning condition is set for 30 minutes
Error condition is set for 60 minutes
This message was generated by Health Monitor.
and when they come back online
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Jul 28
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Server : -------------- Hawkeye is back online.
Last sent message was received 0 minutes ago.
Last sent message was received 0 minutes ago.
This message was generated by Health Monitor.
UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #1
Aug 13, 2016New discussion
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