How To: Use Smart Notifications

What are Smart Notifications

Smart notifications attempt to address those instances where an event occurs that may trigger hundreds of legitimate events and therefore notifications.

As mentioned, these notifications are legitimate, think of a network switch reboot that subsequently reboots a couple hundred cameras at the same time.  While you want to know about this event you DO NOT want to get several hundred email notifications about it.  This is where Smart Notifications can help.

Each smart notification is a point and time snapshot of your system health.  Showing you all the information you need to address the problems you are facing without having to correlate events with previous notifications.

What does it do?

Smart Notifications implement a waiting period (debounce time) where Boring Live Monitoring will listen for additional events.  If additional events are heard, Boring Live Monitoring will continue to hold notifications until a point where it has heard too many (debounce count) after which it mutes all further notifications for a defined period of time (sleep duration).

Along with managing events, it will also provide additional information about the event such as:

• Offline since
• Offline duration
•  Sleep/Alert mode

Why should you use Smart Notifications?

Smart Notifications will reduce the number of notifications received during unexpected incidents while providing a cleaner more valuable notification during standard health events.

Examples of Smart Notifications

Scenario 1: New cameras stop providing video

1. The alert type (camera or recording server)
2. Which managed site this notification is for
3. Whether Boring Live Monitoring is in alert mode (sending notification) or in sleep mode (muting notification)
4. Overview of system health
   • Yellow = Total number of cameras/recorders not functioning properly
   • Red = Number of new cameras/recorders not functioning properly
   • Green = Number of cameras/recorders which were down but have been restored to normal operation
5. Detail on the cameras/recorders restored to normal operation
6. Detail of the new cameras/recorders not functioning properly
7. Detail of the total number of cameras/recorders not functioning properly across the site
   • Newly added cameras/recorders are highlighted in red  

Scenario 2: Cameras restored

When cameras are restored you will again receive a notification giving you the status of the system as a whole.  This notification will show you what was restored as well as what remains down and additional value added details.

1. Again you can see the health of the VMS as a whole.  Note that in this case 4 cameras were restored.
2. In this case, the detail of the 4 cameras which were restored
3. Once restored, this number represents how long these cameras/recorders were not functioning properly. 
   • Shown in either seconds, minutes or hours
4. The time and date the cameras/recorders stopped functioning properly

How to enable Smart Notifications

Smart Notifications are enable on a per-site basis via the managed sites section of the application.

• In the Boring Toolbox client's left navigation, click on "Managed Sites"
• Create or edit an existing a managed site
• Click next, then next again until you are on the third section of the wizard

1. Flip the switch to enable "Smart Notifications"
   
   
2. Set your "Debounce Time"
   • This is the period of time after an event which Boring Live Monitoring will hold and listen for another event before sending a notification
   • As an example, one camera goes down and instead of immediately sending a notification, Boring Live Monitoring will hold that initial notification and wait for another event.  If another camera goes down within the debounce time, Boring Live Monitoring will wait another debounce period.  This will continue until the debounce count is reached.
   • Default = 60 seconds
     
     
3. Set your "Debounce Count"
   • The number of consecutive debounce periods Boring Live Monitoring will wait before entering sleep mode
   • Default = 2
     
     
4. Set the "Sleep Duration"
   • Once the debounce count is reached Boring Live Monitoring notifications will go into sleep mode.  When in sleep mode Boring Live Monitoring will no longer send notifications for the amount of time set here.

What happens when sleep mode is activated?

Boring Live Monitoring will send one final notification when sleep mode is activated letting you know the current state of the Milestone VMS and that sleep mode has been activated

1. Sleep mode has been activated
   
   
2. The date and time sleep mode will be deactivated and notifications will resume