Monitoring alarms with Symphony is easy and efficient. Symphony has been designed to maximize human attention on the cameras that need it most. The following are guidelines as to how you can maximize the monitoring experience in Symphony.
For most users, using one monitor with Symphony Client is fine. The Main Console displays and summarizes activity across your enterprise adequately. For more advanced users or monitoring stations, the ability to see multiple windows and cameras at once may be a requirement. Symphony Client supports multiple monitors (the number of monitors depends on your PCs ability to decompress multiple video streams). This gives you the ability to display the Main Console in one screen, and the Multi-live on the other display. The Multi-Live view can be configured to automatically update which cameras are displayed, focusing your attention on only those cameras where activity is detected by Symphony. It is also easy to manually drag and drop cameras into a Multi-Live view window, by left clicking a camera and dragging it into a Multi-Live view pane. Using two monitors with Multi-live and the Main Console makes this less awkward and more efficient. For those who wish to see more than 16 cameras at once, additional monitors can be connected to the PC (provided your video card allows it, and your PC has enough processing power).
Using the Site Map is easy. To navigate to different cameras (to see a live view) simply left click on the Site Map on the camera you wish to see. You can also drag a camera from the Site Map into a Multi-Live view pane. The colours of the camera indicate camera status. Green means a normal video signal is detected, but no activity is detected. Yellow indicates activity is detected, Red indicates an alarm has occurred on the camera (see Rules on how to configure alarms). A grey signal indicates the camera signal is lost, and a white camera indicates a problem with our software on that camera.
The Alarm Log is in the Main Console is much like your email inbox. Symphony Client can be connected to multiple Symphony Servers at once. Each time an Symphony Server causes an alarm, it pushes a message to Symphony Client, and a new alarm entry appears in the Alarm Log. Simply click on new Alarms as they come in, and Symphony will automatically jump to the correct server and camera which caused the Alarm, allowing you to quickly inspect the video content.
After a new Alarm comes in, and you have inspected the Alarm, you can now mark the alarm as a real alarm, or a false alarm and leaving your notes. This allows security administrators to generate reports on how many alarms were detected by Symphony, the response time by security personnel, and keep track of real alarms to false alarms.
The Alarm Console enables you to respond to Alarms through your internet connection, provided that you have a speaker configured on the remote location. When Alarms arrive through the Alarm Log, and you have assessed the alarm, marked it as false or real and added comments, you may choose to use the Alarm Console to engage a perpetrator. With the Alarm Console, you can speak, play sounds and more.
The Timeline is an integrated display within the Main Console. The Timeline summarizes the activity per bar on a 30 minute basis. It is a quick way to know whether activity was detected before or after the alarm, without having to manually review video. If there is some activity summarized on the Timeline, simply click on it to view a still image of that event. To watch video playback, simply hit Play on the bottom navigation bar.
Viewing Activity for all Cameras
The View Activity for all Cameras form allows you to see a merged Timeline of multiple cameras. Through the Main Console, the currently selected camera's Time Graph is visible, but if you want to compare that with other cameras, you can see this summary through the View Activity for all Cameras form.
A Caroursel is a user definable group of cameras that will loop through on a pre-determined schedule.
If too many alarms are coming in from a particular server or camera, you can temporarily disable alarms so the Alarm Log is not flooded with nuisance alarms.