Getting Started with The Boring Toolbox #3: Learn about the various health monitoring insights and features you will find on…
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There is a reason why Milestone XProtect has 500,000+ installations worldwide and is used by both huge brand names and small brick and mortar companies. Because its the best! As far as Video Management Software goes, Milestone XProtect offers robust functionality with flexible implementation.
The Milestone open platform enables you to add custom, best-in-class security solutions to your surveillance, such as access control, cameras and video analytics.
AKA thanks to Milestone’s open platform model, the global security company can focus on creating a solid foundational software, XProtect, and leave the party tricks to their technology partners.
The end result? A super powerful and customizable security solution that can serve the needs of companies from all industries, of all sizes, all over the world.
It doesn’t get much better than that.
What makes XProtect versatile enough to serve the needs of big and small companies alike, is also what limits it at times. XProtect’s built in management tool, Milestone Management Client, being the one part that seems to have some of the more challenging limitations..
Basic tasks that are critical to your VMS’s overall health and security, such as updating camera hardware names or running compliance reports, can be both tedious and time consuming. No exaggeration here, updating the names of 1,000 cameras in Milestone Management Client would take the average person 25 hours to complete.
It was these monotonous repetitive tasks that gave us the idea for The Boring Lab in the first place! Wanted to eliminate boring work from our lives, and the lives of other security professionals, foreverrrrrrrrr.
At The Boring Lab, we don’t believe XProtect admins should have to toggle between sites to monitor cameras and servers across multiple locations. Whether you are managing 5 cameras or 1,000, 1 site or 12, your experience managing your VMS should be seamless.
Tightly integrated with Milestone XProtect, The Boring Toolbox adds functionality that speaks directly to Milestone Management Server so you never have to skip a beat or do duplicate work again.
Designed exclusively for Milestone XProtect, The Boring Toolbox is an all-in-one solution that allows you to monitor and manage your VMS from one location – no matter how many sites or servers you have.
We’re going to walk you through a few of the basic functions that a security professional encounters on a day-to-day basis in XProtect. But before we do that, let’s answer one the biggest, and most searched queries out there:
The Milestone XProtect Management Client is the primary administrative user interface used for managing cameras and video security. It’s a free software that allows users to check camera status, update software, manage events and alarms, and generate reports as well as monitor live video and recorded footage.
Milestone’s default video management tool, Management Client, is your best friend and go-to tool for managing every aspect of your VMS. Don’t be turned off by the retro aesthetic of their dashboard. Instead, think of it as a refreshing reprieve from the white-on-white, icon-tastic, CSS-heavy tech websites that you see all day, every day.
Retro aesthetic
Adding camera and device hardware
This is done by right-clicking on the recording server and adding hardware.
Changing camera settings including frame rate, resolution, codec but more importantly the device-specific settings like Axis Zipstream
Renaming individual cameras and devices
Creating camera device groups for bulk settings application, device permissions, etc.
Adding roles/users for granular permissions on who can see what camera or device (ie. go-to roles, create a role, and then add Windows users or basic Milestone users to that role)
Set up automation rules
Configure alarms, events, and everything you need to manage Milestone XProtect on a daily basis
Milestone Management Client is suitable for getting started with your XProtect system. But as your system and system requirements grow, basic management tasks will become increasingly more tedious and time-consuming.
So much so that, for a 500 camera system, a full-time dedicated employee would be needed to manage manual tasks such as adding hardware, bulk updating camera names and passwords, and managing device groups.
Not to mention that live health monitoring, multi-site management, and customizable notification settings aren’t possible with Milestone Management Client alone, leaving admins with the chore of finding suitable add-on solutions to simplify VMS management.
While Milestone Management Client is a powerful VMS management interface, the Boring Toolbox makes it better with the power of bulk operations, a simple user interface, and intuitive workflows. It’s designed exclusively to make managing your Milestone XProtect VMS easier, more efficient, and less boring.
We’ve created solutions that will not only help system admins gain more insight into the health of their VMS and increase cyber security but will also give them more control and require less time to manage their VMS.
With cybersecurity threats and IoT vulnerabilities present constant dangers to your data, updated camera passwords and performing bulk hardware updates are essential steps to protecting your VMS and its assets.
With The Boring Toolbox, you can update your camera passwords in just 1% of the time it takes on Milestone Management Client. Admins have historically had to manually update each camera password, taking on average about 60-90 seconds per camera. Therefore, it would take you approximately 8 – 12.5 hours to update the passwords for 500 cameras.
Creating a camera inventory report in XProtect is a pretty repetitive process that involves either a 1000 page PDF or hours of copying and pasting IP addresses, names, passwords, and more from different parts of the management client.
But when all the information you need is already in Milestone, why spend time recreating it?
You’ll save time while creating useful, filterable Excel reports on camera hardware, devices, and stream information.
Instead of using Milestone Management Client for standard PDF summaries, amp up your reporting game with the Boring Toolbox and collect more actionable insights and data.
The value of the Boring Toolbox reporting:
The standard method for health monitoring through the default management client is clicking on a recording server and looking for the little black tile where the video should be or email alerts. But historically, the alerts have been known to cause thousands of false alerts, which typically ends in one of two ways
Either way, you are left with little to no insight into the health of your VMS unless you manually check the health of each camera and server on a daily basis. Yikes.
The Boring Toolbox sends you automatic live monitoring health alerts by leveraging an ongoing background service that creates events based on thresholds that YOU define. This gives you more control over what qualifies as a VMS health issue and ensures you only receive notifications that matter.
Alerts are only sent when a camera or recording server’s health events pass the threshold level that you establish. Once the issue is resolved, you’ll get an update about that as well.
You’ll never have to worry again about whether your VMS is functioning properly or not.
As a larger enterprise with hundreds or thousands of cameras in several locations, it isn’t always ideal to be logging in and out of management servers to get a full scale view of your global VMS health.
Because of this, you may not check each server as regularly as you should. But that leaves your system, assets, and clients at risk.
At Boring, we’ve simplified the process of checking in on the health of your VMS by consolidating the information onto one multi-site dashboard. View all sites together on your global dashboard or zoom in on local single-site locations by toggling between the tabs.
You can even customize alerts for each location using unique notification thresholds so there is never a need to second guess if your cameras are online or not.
| Features | Management Client | Professional | Corporate | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MULTI-SITE MANAGEMENT | |||||
| Manage multiple management servers in one client | | | | ||
| Real time global camera health | | | | ||
| Real time global server health | | | | ||
| Global camera status report (Excel) | | | | ||
| Global notifications report (Excel) | | | | ||
| LOCAL DASHBOARD | |||||
| At-a-glance camera storage used per device | | | | ||
| At-a-glance recording server storage health | | | | ||
| Real-time display of cameras not providing video | | | | ||
| Real-time display of offline recording servers | | | | ||
| Report on hardware count per server | | | | ||
| Report on camera brand distribution | | | | ||
| Export cameras not providing video to Excel | | | | ||
| Export offline recording servers to Excel | | | | ||
| Proactice notifications of flapping cameras | | | | ||
| Proactive notifications of mis-configured archive configurations | | | | ||
| Easily accessible web interface | | | | ||
| Quick identification of critical cameras not providing video | | | | ||
| SD-card inventory and health monitoring | | | | ||
| CAMERA & SERVER HEALTH MONITORING | |||||
| Always on monitoring of cameras & server failures | | | | ||
| Proactive notifications when cameras & servers come back online | | | | ||
| Set a time threshold before notifications are sent | | | | ||
| Filter out interconnected servers from health monitoring | | | | ||
| Customize the frequency of notifications | | | | ||
| Smart notifications | | | | ||
| Critical notification mode | | | | ||
| Maintenance mode | | | | ||
| Tagging of critical cameras | | | | ||
| SD-card monitoring for Axis, Hanwah and Bosch cameras | | | | ||
| DEVICE GROUP MANAGEMENT | |||||
| Create Device Groups | | | | ||
| Add device group members | | | | ||
| Create Auto device groups by camera model | | | | ||
| Create Auto device groups by storage configuration | | | | ||
| Add device group members using search | | | | ||
| HARDWARE MANAGEMENT | |||||
| Rename hardware and devices | | | | ||
| Enable/Disable hardware and devices | | | | ||
| Update settings per device | | | | ||
| Rename hardware and devices in bulk | | | | ||
| Enable/Disable hardware and devices in bulk | | | | ||
| Set Resolution & Frame-rate per stream in bulk | | | | ||
| Update hardware IP address in bulk | | | | ||
| Enable HTTPS in bulk | | | | ||
| Search for camera by name, IP/MAC address or subnet | | | | ||
| Reboot Axis & Hanwha Cameras directly from the client | | | | ||
| Auto-focus Axis & Hanwha Cameras directly from the client | | | | ||
| Zoom Axis & Hanwha veri-focal cameras | | | | ||
| Enlarge and replay video from connected cameras | | | | ||
| REPORTING | |||||
| Create PDF Reports | | | | ||
| Include camera snapshots in report | | | | ||
| Create filterable Excel spreadsheets for auditing | | | | ||
| Include device credentials in report | | | | ||
| Device Video Retention Audit (Days) | | | | ||
| Scheduled Reports via Email | | | | ||
| Save scheduled reports to shared drive | |||||
| PASSWORD MANAGEMENT | |||||
| Update camera passwords in Milestone | | | | ||
| Update camera passwords in Milestone in bulk | | | | ||
| Change passwords on camera hardware in bulk | | | | ||
| Quickly copy passwords for hardware devices | | | | ||
| Bulk update passwords in Milestone for non-supported hardware | | | | ||
| | |||||
| Features | Management Client | Professional | Corporate |
| MULTI-SITE MANAGEMENT | |||
| Manage multiple management servers in one client | |||
| Real time global camera health | |||
| Real time global server health | |||
| Global camera status report (Excel) | |||
| Global notifications report (Excel) | |||
| LOCAL DASHBOARD | |||
| At-a-glance camera storage used per device | |||
| At-a-glance recording server storage health | |||
| Real-time display of cameras not providing video | |||
| Real-time display of offline recording servers | |||
| Report on hardware count per server | |||
| Report on camera brand distribution | |||
| Export cameras not providing video to Excel | |||
| Export offline recording servers to Excel | |||
| Proactice notifications of flapping cameras | |||
| Proactive notifications of mis-configured archive configurations | |||
| Easily accessible web interface | |||
| Quick identification of critical cameras not providing video | |||
| SD-card inventory and health monitoring | |||
| CAMERA & SERVER HEALTH MONITORING | |||
| Always on monitoring of cameras & server failures | |||
| Proactive notifications when cameras & servers come back online | |||
| Set a time threshold before notifications are sent | |||
| Filter out interconnected servers from health monitoring | |||
| Customize the frequency of notifications | |||
| Smart notifications | |||
| Critical notification mode | |||
| Maintenance mode | |||
| Tagging of critical cameras | |||
| SD-card monitoring for Axis, Hanwah and Bosch cameras | |||
| DEVICE GROUP MANAGEMENT | |||
| Create Device Groups | |||
| Add device group members | |||
| Create Auto device groups by camera model | |||
| Create Auto device groups by storage configuration | |||
| Add device group members using search | |||
| HARDWARE MANAGEMENT | |||
| Rename hardware and devices | |||
| Enable/Disable hardware and devices | |||
| Update settings per device | |||
| Rename hardware and devices in bulk | |||
| Enable/Disable hardware and devices in bulk | |||
| Set Resolution & Frame-rate per stream in bulk | |||
| Update hardware IP address in bulk | |||
| Enable HTTPS in bulk | |||
| Search for camera by name, IP/MAC address or subnet | |||
| Reboot Axis & Hanwha Cameras directly from the client | |||
| Auto-focus Axis & Hanwha Cameras directly from the client | |||
| Zoom Axis & Hanwha veri-focal cameras | |||
| Enlarge and replay video from connected cameras | |||
| REPORTING | |||
| Create PDF Reports | |||
| Include camera snapshots in report | |||
| Create filterable Excel spreadsheets for auditing | |||
| Include device credentials in report | |||
| Device Video Retention Audit (Days) | |||
| Scheduled Reports via Email | |||
| Save scheduled reports to shared drive | |||
| PASSWORD MANAGEMENT | |||
| Update camera passwords in Milestone | |||
| Update camera passwords in Milestone in bulk | |||
| Change passwords on camera hardware in bulk | |||
| Quickly copy passwords for hardware devices | |||
| Bulk update passwords in Milestone for non-supported hardware | |||
We know implementing new tools into your workflow can be a drag. Especially when there is software that needs to be downloaded and blah blah blah BUT trust us when we tell you, it’s worth it.
Within the first few moments of using The Boring Toolbox, you will know:
Start using The Boring Toolbox for free when you sign up for the 30-day free trial. The typical installation time for The Boring Toolbox is just 15 minutes. Our product comes in two parts: a server and a client.
The server is installed on the management server, feeding data to the client, monitoring system health, and more. The client is a Windows installable application that runs on any workstation or server on your network.
For more information about what’s required to get started with The Boring Toolbox, check out our System Requirements
Your go-to XProtect eXPerts. We learn the technical stuff that will save you time and make it less boring.
Your go-to XProtect eXPerts. We learn the technical stuff that will save you time and make it less boring.
Getting Started with The Boring Toolbox #3: Learn about the various health monitoring insights and features you will find on…
Getting Started #2: Learn how to configure your parent and managed sites as well as connect Boring to Milestone XProtect…
Getting Started #1: This tutorial will teach you how to install The Boring Toolbox on your server and client.
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