The Boring Lab

Smart Notifications: The Best VMS Live Health Monitoring Notifications for Milestone XProtect

Learning that your cameras are down is stressful enough. You need live monitoring notifications that bring you clarity, not chaos. Smart Notifications, the newest feature in The Boring Toolbox, give you a snapshot overview of your camera and server health in one simple, easy-to-understand email. With Smart Notifications, you'll never need to sort through hundreds of emails again trying to make sense of events on your VMS. In this blog, you will learn how to read your Smart Notifications like a pro and how you can activate them on your Milestone XProtect VMS today.
Table of Contents

What are Smart Notifications?

As a Milestone XProtect admin, it’s hard to be prepared for the unexpected. Unanticipated shutdowns, system reboots, and camera failures can all trigger hundred of legitimate events in your VMS, and therefore hundreds of notifications. 

But the last thing you need during these unexpected events is to search through endless emails about what went wrong and how to fix it.

We’ve solved the inbox bloat and over-alerting with our newest tool, Smart Notifications. Instead of getting several hundred emails, the Boring Lab sends you just one with a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know about your system and camera health. 

Each smart notification is a point and time snapshot of your system’s health. With all the relevant information at your fingertips, you can say goodbye to endless searching through your inbox to correlate problems with previous events.

What do Smart Notifications 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 reduce the number of notifications you’d receive during unexpected incidents. Instead, you’ll get just one notification with everything you need to know.

Therefore providing a cleaner, more valuable notification system during standard health events.

How to Read Your Smart Notifications

How to Enable Smart Notifications

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

(!) Before you begin, make sure you have the latest version of the Boring Toolbox downloaded. 

  • 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

Get Started

Boring Customers: download the latest version of The Boring Toolbox

Existing customers can get started with Smart Notifications immediately by updating their toolbox and following the instructions listed above.

New Customers: sign up for a 30 day free trial

Experience the joy of Smart Notifications and get unrestricted access to all of the features included in The Boring Toolbox when you sign up for a no obligation, 30 day free trial

Team Boring

Your go-to XProtect eXPerts. We learn the technical stuff that will save you time and make it less boring.

Team Boring

Your go-to XProtect eXPerts. We learn the technical stuff that will save you time and make it less boring.

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