Alarms and incidents
Acknowledge and resolve alarms, work by incident, review the alarm clip, share an incident through a temporary read-only link, and set the response policy.
Contents
Alarms come from analytics rules, image checks, camera health, Cloud arming, and, where your package includes them, alarm panels and email. Open Alarms to handle them. The Open alarms pane in Monitor shows the same work.
Alarms or incidents
- Video customers handle each alarm on its own.
- Monitoring customers work by incident, which groups related alarms. Switch between Incidents and Alarms at the top of the page; every alarm stays searchable on its own.
The status filter starts on Needs action. Other statuses include Acknowledged and Resolved.
Acknowledge
Select Acknowledge when you take responsibility for an alarm, not just to show that you saw it. The portal shows who acknowledged it and when.
In an incident, the first acknowledgement makes you responsible for it. Another operator must select Take over incident before acting on it. New alarms that arrive in an incident stay pending, even for the operator who is responsible.
Resolve
- Review the alarm and its evidence.
- Optionally write a Resolution note of up to 1,000 characters.
- Select Resolve.
Resolving closes only the alarms you reviewed. An alarm that arrives while you resolve stays open.
To make the note compulsory, a tenant administrator turns on Require a resolution note under Settings > Alarms > Response policy.
Reopen
People with the Reopen resolved alarms and incidents permission can select Reopen alarm or Reopen incident and give a reason. The earlier response history is kept, and the next acknowledgement takes responsibility again.
Camera offline and back online
A camera that sends no video for 60 seconds raises an alarm, so brief interruptions do not. When video returns, a second alarm follows. In the alarm list they read Video unavailable and Video restored. Both are on by default, and their settings are under Settings > Alarms > Video availability.
Video evidence
With Verify, each alarm carries video from its camera and from the cameras associated with its source in the Site's Camera associations, as many as four. Open the alarm to see the evidence, and switch between Clip, Live, and Both.
A tenant administrator sets the clip length under Settings > Video evidence: Before alarm and After alarm, each from 3 to 20 seconds, 20 by default. Evidence is added when it is available and never delays or blocks the alarm.
Share an incident
Select Incident portal on an alarm to open a read-only page that you can share with one recipient, such as a guard or the police. The link:
- shows the alarm's evidence cameras, and never gives access to the rest of your portal;
- expires after the Link lifetime set under Settings > Incident portals, from 1 to 168 hours, 24 by default;
- can be revoked at any time from Settings > Incident portals.
On the same page, a tenant administrator can choose Also share other Site cameras for live viewing. Shared links stay view-only either way.
Rules for alarm actions
Under Settings > Alarms > System rules, a tenant administrator adds a New system rule that sends an email or a webhook, or switches site outputs, when a trigger occurs. The alarms themselves come from each camera's rules and settings; see Analytics rules and Image checks.