The challenge
When a shopper slipped and fell at one of a regional retail chain’s locations, the cameras missed it: the recording server had failed. The claim that followed accused the chain of withholding video, and the only proof of the outage was a few emails and a repair invoice dated 30 days later.
The chain brought in Matt Fox to make sure that couldn’t happen again. Matt has run Fox Den Productions as a one-person integration shop for more than 20 years. He inherited cameras, recording servers and access control across three districts, a mix of newer and older equipment, and no way to see when any of it went down.
The solution
Matt and the chain’s loss-prevention team found eyeOT at ISC West, looking for one thing: a record of every camera going down. Matt rolled eyeOT out across every location himself, starting with the servers, then bringing in the cameras through eyeOT’s Hanwha WAVE integration. He got the record he came for, and a lot more:
- Every outage logged, from the moment a device went down to the moment it came back
- One alert that points to the root cause, instead of a flood of alerts about every symptom
- Remote reboots, so the client’s team can power-cycle a stuck camera’s switch port without a service call
- A 90-day retention check on every camera, so a short recording setting shows up before anyone needs the footage
Matt designs in eyeOT planner, too. He helped shape the product from the beginning, and he’s bringing his floor plans into it.
“Before eyeOT, we had no way to know when a camera or recording server went offline, or how long it stayed down. Now we have that information the moment it happens, and a record of every outage.”
Matt FoxOwner, Fox Den ProductionsThe results
- Servers at every location on eyeOT in two days. Today that’s 968 cameras and 35 recording servers across 18 retail locations, all looked after by one integrator.
- 2,618 issues caught and resolved in four months. Each one is logged from the moment it started to the moment it was fixed. They’re the everyday wear of a large, inherited system, now handled before anyone needs the footage.
- One alert, one root cause. Matt gets the alert that matters instead of a flood of symptoms. When a PC kept rebooting, eyeOT’s alerts showed the pattern, and he traced it to a program that kept locking the machine up. He removed it, and the problem was gone.
- Remote reboots instead of service calls. When a camera hangs, the client’s team can power-cycle its switch port from eyeOT, and every reset they’ve run has worked.
