Troubleshooting Surveillance Systems Is Easy, Troubleshooting Alarm Systems Is Hard

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Ethan Ace
Apr 21, 2017

A quote from a recent discussion:

Troubleshooting surveillance systems is easy.

Troubleshooting alarm systems is hard.

What do you think?

 

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Joseph Parker
Apr 21, 2017

I find this really confusing and would love clarification.  Wired alarms are the easiest thing to troubleshoot ever.  A multi meter and some magnets solve 90% of issues.  The remaining 10% gets sorted out with resistors, relays, etc. In fact, I find wireless contacts to be infinitely more frustrating and far less reliable.  As for surveillance, you have analog, HDoC, and IP all with their own sets of trials and quirks.  I was brought up in the Networking, AV, and surveillance world with minimal alarm experience yet I've never had an issue I felt stymied by.   What am I missing?  

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Ari Erenthal
Apr 21, 2017

If I had a dollar for every alarm installer I know who doesn't understand how relays or resistors work, I would have way more dollars than I'm comfortable with. Especially installers who work mainly residential and have come on in the last 5 years, because a lot of those guys are wireless only. Ask them to troubleshoot a wired system and they're lost. 

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Brian Rhodes
Apr 21, 2017
IPVMU Certified

Alarm systems are essentially closed, but video surveillance commonly lives in one of Dante's rings of Hades: shared network.

That simple fact alone creates a huge difference in troubleshooting.  Totally unrelated things/devices/policies can FUBAR your video system.

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Armando Perez
Apr 26, 2017
Hoosier Security and Security Owners Group • IPVMU Certified

I think this perception comes from the simple fact that most wired alarm systems don't have a GUI. We've reached an age where working on a pc is considered a common skill (even if not proficient), and clicking on a check box or entering an ip is perceived as "easier" than going through layers of * and # alarm programming.

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Campbell Chang
Apr 27, 2017

I'd agree with this. Especially if you're unfamiliar with a system.

Trawling through a manual looking for the appropriate options in system where your ability to fix things relies on you entering numbers on a keypad in a specific order with no visual display.

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Apr 21, 2017

I suppose it depends on a person's level of experience in the type of system. 

I've been doing primarily alarm work over 30 years, hardwire and wireless, and can quickly diagnose and repair alarm system problems.  Many times, I don't need to do a truck roll to solve a problem expressed by a user as the problem is usually the user.  But, now and then, an intermittent alarm problem will occur and it can be challenging to troubleshoot and repair. 

I had a customer call about motion detector false alarms in a warehouse.  Went there and looked for environmental changes, asked customer about any rodent problem but he did not acknowledge one, and tested everything which checked out fine.  Put the zone on "no dispatch, call sub only" for a week and had another false alarm from that zone.  Went back and changed out the motion detector to "pet immune" as I suspected rodents, a few days later had another false alarm from that zone.  Panel was good, wire resistance was fine, looked around again for environmental issues such as hanging decorations, signs, fans, heaters, and FINALLY I found it!   Looking around on the floor, behind a workbench in a poorly lit area I found animal scat, feces, waste....and not rodent dropping.  They had a chain link secured area inside that I believe an animal was climbing.  One of the employees of this customer told me that during the day they leave the roll-up doors open and one day, weeks before, he saw a family of raccoons walking away from the roll-up door.  I told them to search the warehouse for varmints and make sure they keep the roll-up door closed or monitor the opening when the door is up.  No more false alarms!!

Most of the issues I've had with surveillance systems are network related and, even with many years of working with computers, network issues are sometime challenging.

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Joseph Parker
Apr 25, 2017

A couple of years ago I developed a policy for any kind of cable issue: if the issue take more than 15 minutes to resolve, pull a new cable.  This obviously isn't always feasible, but it is much of the time.  I've wasted hours avoiding it, and once had a tech try to fix a 50 foot network cable ran through a drop ceiling for 4 hours before calling me.  It's saved us alot of time.  That said, warehouse jobs especially tend to be an outlier because you need a lift to replace the wire.  Good catch!

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Ari Erenthal
Apr 25, 2017

That's a business decision, and a perfectly understandable one for commercial installations (other than warehouses, as you say).

Residential alarms require either fishing wires or using a wireless transmitter, either of which can be more expensive than spending, say, an hour trying to troubleshoot. 

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Apr 25, 2017

Thanks.  I'm not saying alarms are more difficult to troubleshoot, just pointing out that sometimes alarm problems have nothing to do with the alarm equipment, the design or the installation, and you need to know how to deal with these types of calls.  When dealing with alarms, troubleshooting does not always mean you need to grab a meter and go running to the job site. Many times you can resolve problems over the phone or via a remote programming session.

I've had calls from customers complaining that they hear beeping which they attribute to the alarm system.  In one case, a customer called and said she heard a beep every 30 seconds and suspected the smoke detector connected to the alarm system. She told me the battery must be low and she could figure out how to open it to change the battery. The smoke detector was a 4-wire model with no integral sounder, no battery, and it was impossible for the detector to make that sound.  I told her that over the phone and she insisted the detector was making that awful beep.  I asked her to look for other smoke detectors that may be battery powered or battery backed.  She replied she changed batteries in all the others but would look for another source of the beeps. I assured her that the beep she is hearing has nothing to do with the alarm equipment installed by my company. 

A day later she called and told me she broke the 4-wire smoke detector trying to open it, found no battery to change, but she stills thinks it is the source of the beep.  Now a truck roll was required.  When I go there I noticed the detector's cover cracked beyond repair.  I pointed out there was not integral sounder so it could not make a beep. I replaced it with a newer model and charged her for the call.  A day later she called and told me the beep was back, but this time she found the source, a battery powered smoke detector she failed to spot in an adjacent room.

These types of complaints aren't the technical challenge the original post intended to address, but they do demonstrate the types of issues alarm installers have that are unique from those in surveillance. 

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Undisclosed Integrator #1
Apr 25, 2017

Maybe the original post should have been about which is more problematic, alarm systems or surveillance systems.  I think the alarm systems would take the lead in that race.

Calls from customers complaining about a variety of things take time to address, whether over the phone, remote diagnostics or in person.   Here are a few examples:

1. The keypad doesn't work when disarming, usually a new employee is the person experiencing this type of situation, remedied by asking a frequent user to arm and disarm to verify the problem, which results in a cancellation of the service request.

2. Alarm won't arm, shows a window or sliding door is open when the customer can clearly see, from 20 feet away, that it's closed.  I ask them to go to the window or door and open/close it.  This usually fixes the problem because the window or door was not completely closed.

3. Alarm won't arm, keypad shows "ALARM Zn NN, Not Ready", but everything is closed.  Someone failed to clear the last alarm event at the keypad.

4. Alarm sounded at 3AM, came from a hardwired zone which now shows open at the keypad but the zone is closed.  Many of these calls occur during heavy rains or extreme cold or hot weather.  Ask if they've seen or heard evidence of rodents in their home. Usually, the reply is yes.  Take some wireless equipment to repair this one, unless you want to make the same repair over and over again.

5. Motion detector tripped for no reason.  These can be a challenge, learn what questions to ask such as:  Have there been any recent changes in the environment?   Hanging decorations?  Portable floor heaters in use?  Balloons?  New machinery or office equipment?  Signs of rodents or small animals?  Insects around the detector, cob webs?  These usually require a truck roll.

6. Keypad is beeping and TELCO FAULT or COMM FAIL is present on keypad.  This one is easy to troubleshoot.  Recent telephone changes?  Long distance changes?  VOIP?  Time to upgrade to iP/cellular?

Between the two, I get more calls about alarm systems and can't remember when I was last called about a surveillance system.  To be fair, I do more alarms than surveillance systems.  But people interact with alarms everyday, unlike surveillance systems that might be checked when there is an event.

 

UM
Undisclosed Manufacturer #2
Apr 21, 2017

I think this is a skewed audience to administer a poll like this to. The majority of people on IPVM are trouble shooting video surveillance systems. Not everybody on here is trouble shooting alarm systems. 

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Ethan Ace
Apr 26, 2017

You know, I actually expected more objections from the video side, considering our audience, but so far votes have skewed toward alarms being harder and more people are speaking out on alarms. It's the IPVM secret alarm crew.

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Marty Major
Apr 24, 2017
Teledyne FLIR

I have to point out that the only two examples given for difficulty troubleshooting alarms systems have little to do with troubleshooting alarm systems:

1 - Ari's comment - techs (generally new hires) don't know how the alarm system functions.

2 -  UDI1's comment - unaccounted for neighborhood crapping animals.

I agree with Mr. Parker.... 

 

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Ari Erenthal
Apr 24, 2017

That's the thing, though, troubleshooting alarms requires knowledge of basic electronics, and can be affected by a million different external factors.

Surveillance is a pain in the neck until you learn networking, at which point it's a totally different pain in the neck. The thing that's causing your problem could be totally out of your control, as Brian points out, but at least you can probably narrow it down to an identifiable cause you can point to. 

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Marty Major
Apr 24, 2017
Teledyne FLIR

your words are wise.... electronics and physics are skill-sets required to properly troubleshoot alarms. mostly anyway - wouldn't you agree?

I am not saying each can't be difficult.  And the larger the systems, the more points of failure that need to be accounted for when diagnosing problems.

But IP video systems can not be mastered simply by knowing networking.  Certainly you need a fundamental understanding of the basics - just like in alarms (if not even less so) - but most IP video systems run on Windows.

That is another of Dante's Ring of Hades that OG Brian refers to.  :) 

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David Nelson-Gal
Apr 24, 2017

When things are more complex, reliability is lower and human error is higher. This is physics. Issues can be categorized into following problems:

1) Problems of system design (inadequate networks, power, equipment)

2) Human error on configuration installation (bad wiring job, setup with wrong parameters)

3) Deterioration of configuration (failed components, motion changes in scene)

4) Procedural / Process (changes in logical configuration, inadequate priority for ongoing maintenance)

The secret to having a good operation is the following: 

  1. Design It Right,
  2. Build It Right,
  3. Keep It Right.

Alarm & access systems issues are dominated by relatively simple electrical devices, the readers, sensors, strike plates and controllers. Alarm devices have very specific failure conditions and behaviors. The applications require a central management server and maybe collection of fanout servers that help accommodate a global organization. Skills required are electrical wiring, cabling and then familiarity with the applications. The complexity of ongoing operations is tied to organization complexity around adding and removing access, and then monitoring operations for the infrastructure. Large organizations can run on a single server or a limited hierarchy of servers, relying on networks to talk to controllers distributed geographically. The traffic between applications and edge devices is limited to relatively small amounts of data. When things break, people know almost immediately because people can't get access that they should. Alarms alarm.

Video surveillance systems have edge devices that are complete systems. Many IP cameras today are very similar to mini servers in their own right. Recording servers have to have enough beef to handled ingesting large amounts of video and audio traffic and store it fast enough in an organized way so it can be recalled on demand. A recording server relies on complex, RAIDed storage arrays. A recording server might support up to a hundred cameras at maximum and probably average across the industry between 25-30 cameras per recorder. This means that large organizations will have one to two orders of magnitude more recording servers than they have access control servers. The quantity of data can easily saturate gigabit networks, putting a significant burden on network design. Power for cameras in the network fabric through PoE creates its own class of issues. Finally, when things break, people may not notice, potentially creating cascading failures over time. 

The consequence of all this is that Video Surveillance systems have significantly greater complexity and subtle problems that often require multiple disciplines to diagnose. Also, because it doesn't seem as important as AC, people don't necessarily invest in the maintenance of these systems to the degree they are required allowing problems to decay into crisis levels. Finally, many of these configurations don't have good enough tools to diagnose them. As a result, even competent techs have to invest a lot of hours to diagnosis a problem. 

As a vendor that supports both kinds of systems, AC is necessary and important but a significant amount of our technology and automation is around diagnosing video systems because it is that much harder to deal with. Across the hundreds of customers and tens of thousands of cameras and access devices we support globally every day, it is video that people need the most diagnostic help with.

In summary, neither is what I would call "easy" to trouble shoot but the failure scenarios and complexity on surveillance systems are orders of magnitude greater. Whoever said "trouble-shooting surveillance is easy," or easier than trouble shooting alarm systems is probably someone who lacks experience.

 

 

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Ethan Ace
Apr 26, 2017

For the record, I think saying either is harder is pointless. They're different skill sets with a little bit of overlap.

I can tell you that troubleshooting surveillance isn't easy, though. High level stuff is easy, sure. Check this setting, update that, network issue whatever. However, low level issues (imager and chip issues, UDP/TCP problems, this noise vs. that noise vs. the other noise, etc. etc. etc.) are not so easy. I have a large quantity of clueless emails I've received from experienced people to prove it. And I don't judge anyone for that; It's not stuff that most people really need to know given how reasonably plug n play things are now.

Also keep in mind that the bar for what is considered functional in video surveillance is lower than in intrusion (or access or fire). If the camera is displaying an image, albeit not optimized in any way, possibly noisy, possibly kinda crappy in low light, possibly with a stuck IR cut filter, there is a surprisingly large segment of users out there who will not complain about it and just accept that that's how it is now. And errors which degrade video are (in my experience and opinion) much more common in surveillance than errors which take cameras offline.

On the flip side, if an alarm zone is randomly activating and dispatching (at the least) users to check it out, or resulting in false alarm fines from police (at worst), a user is going to pay much more attention to it. Squeaky wheel gets the grease and all that.

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Campbell Chang
Apr 27, 2017

I think each field carries it's own set of technical challenges.

On the video side, you've got a whole realm of networking issues that require significant amounts of IT knowledge to overcome.

On the alarm side, you've got systems that require basic electronics knowledge, a plethora of potential external factors and often lack of visual references and/or detailed error logs.

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