How to: Using maintenance mode

What is maintenance mode?

With Maintenance mode, you can mute all notifications for a selection of cameras or recording servers and remove those devices from the live monitoring dashboard, thereby eliminating any unwanted alerts.​

You can schedule recurring maintenance modes for entire servers up to twice a week, for up to one full calendar day at a time or if you need more time, then Maintenance mode can be enabled manually on individual devices or entire recording servers.

What does it do?

When enabled either manually or via a schedule maintenance mode will have the below effects on functions of the Boring Toolbox.

• Mutes notifications for devices and/or recording servers changing state (ie: providing video/not providing video, online/offline).
• Removes devices and/or recording servers from the live monitoring in the local dashboard
• Milestone reports will show "maintenance mode" when reporting on
  • Camera status
  • Used space
  • Retention reporting
  • Video snapshot

Why should you use maintenance mode?

There are several use cases for maintenance mode that our customer's have come up with but I am sure you will come up with more as you use the feature.  

Windows or Network Updates

As you are doing Windows or network updates recording server will be restarting and cameras will stop and restart providing video.  This could lead to a large number of accurate but, unwanted, notifications from the Boring Toolbox.

Using maintenance mode will allow you to run Windows updates without sending what are essentially false positives to the rest of the team members.

Defective hardware waiting on replacement

There are incidents where a system can have many devices that you know are defective.  When looking at the dashboard theses "known bad" devices can obscure new devices that go bad or present issues. 

By putting these "known bad" devices in maintenance mode you can clean up the live monitoring tile on the dashboard, make new notifications more evident, make live monitoring more relevant, and allow you to have better control of the health of your VMS.

How to enable maintenance mode

Manual maintenance mode

You can enable manual maintenance mode on camera hardware as well as recording servers.  This is done in the hardware section of the Boring Toolbox client.

1. Select the devices you would like to set to maintenance mode.  This can be individual cameras or an entire recording server
2. Click "Enable Maintenance"
   • When maintenance mode is already enabled the prompt will change to "Disable Maintenance" (like in the image above)
3. A wrench icon will be displayed on all devices with maintenance mode enabled
4. To see all devices in maintenance mode you can filter by "Device Status" equals Maintenance Mode

Scheduled Maintenance Mode

Scheduled maintenance will allow enable maintenance mode on a recurring schedule.  For example every Tuesday and Thursday or the 15th of every month.

1. Navigate to Scheduling > Maintenance
2. Click, Create Scheduled Maintenance

1. Name your schedule
2. Select one or many recording servers to be put into maintenance mode
3. Select the type of recurrence (weekly or monthly)
   • If weekly is chosen you can select up to two days a week (as shown above)
4. Select day of the week (up to two) or day of the month
5. Choose your start date and time and your end date and time
   • Selecting "Set Max Date" will set the schedule to recur for five years from the date your enable the schedule
6. Set the time zone you would like the schedule to run in
7. Enter the email of the person or people you would like to receive the maintenance started/stopped notifications
8. Click Save

Once schedule is saved you will see it as a row in the scheduled maintenance view.  You can select the schedule and then press edit if you ever need to make a change.