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Smtp alarms (Email Alarms)

Tom Bradley
Updated

Permissions: Requires the "Edit Area configuration" Permission (included in the "Admin" user-role by default).

The Alarm Setup screen allows you to add and configure Standards based Alarms for your different areas. SureView supports Email / SMTP or JSON over HTTPS alarms

Smtp (Email) alarms are the most common type of alarm triggers, this allows any device, system or even person which can send an email to trigger a cosponsoring within SureView

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Each alarm has a unique identifier or email address that can be used to trigger an alarm event in the SureView Alarm Processing Queue

 

Quick Guide

This section will quick instructions for setting up a basic mail alarm. or more advanced instructions and details please see the sections below.

  1. Go to the Alarm Setup screen and make sure the Smtp Alarms tab is selected
  2. Click the Add Alarm button
  3. Configure your alarm point with the following details (other fields can be left blank)
    1. Alarm Name e.g. "Stairwell", "Front Door", "Main Entrance" etc
    2. Area - The Area/Site the alarm point should be associated with
    3. Action Plan - If you have an Action Plan for your operators to follow such select it, otherwise leave this blank
    4. Priority - How important the alarm is (higher the number, the more important the alarm). Normal alarms are normally set to priorty 100
    5. Grouping - Select "By Area"
    6. Auto Handle - Select "No"
  4. Press Add
  5. Find the alarm you just created by searching for the Alarm Name or Area
  6. Copy the unique email address of your new alarm
  7. Paste the email address into your alarming device or system and configure it to send email alarms (see "Device Email Configuration" below)

Device Email Configuration

From: Any email address. It does not matter,
To: Use the email address shown in the Alarm Setup "SMTP Alarms" screen. e.g. Ag34r8vwqt@us.sureviewops.com

Subject: The alarm message that will be shown to operators. e.g. "Motion Detected"

Body: The body is not displayed in the main alarm queue, but operators can open the full email to get the extra detail that would be in the body of the email. If the body contains Decimal GPS coordinates in the format latitude, longitude then the alarm will automatically be plotted on the SureView Alarm Map e.g. "51.650646,-3.914983"

Attachments: MP4 alarm clips or JPG alarm snapshots

SMTP Server Details If custom server details are required for sending email alarms please see the SMTP Details section

 

Example Email Alarm

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Device Email Alarm configured to send:

From: demo@sureviewsystems.com

To: 8nrawg1sxc@us.sureviewops.com

Subject: Door Forced

Message Body: There has been an alarm triggered at location 27.947380,-82.460741

Attachments: AlarmClip1.MP4

 

Email Alarm recieved in SureView

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Configuring Email Alarm Points

To add a new alarm point click on the "Add Alarm" button, this will show an alarm point popup window that you can then complete to add your new alarm point

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Properties

Below is a list of the available fields that can be entered when adding or editing an Alarm

Field Description
Alarm Name
(Required) 		The friendly name for this alarm. This is the name that will be shown to the operator when it is triggered.
Area
(required)		 What Area is this alarm associated with.
Linked Cameras
(Optional)		 You can link this alarm with specific cameras so that the cameras you choose pop-up automatically when an Operator opens this alarm. (See Video Device Setup)
Action Plan
(Optional)		 An alarm can (optionally) be associated with an Action Plan. This will provide the operator with a set of instructions that they will be required to follow when processing this alarm.
Alarm Decoder

Note: This is an Advanced Option so we recommend you speak to SureView Support so we can help with the initial setup.

This allows you to choose a preconfigured alarm decoder to associate with this alarm (see Alarm Decoder section). This allows you to decode custom alarm formats.

 

For standard email alarms you can leave this blank.
Response Code Note: This is an Advanced Option so we recommend you speak to SureView Support so we can help with the initial setup.

This is a customisable response code/identifier field that you can use to match alarms. It will only be visible if you have selected a specific "Alarm Decoder" in the previous field
Priority This is an indication of how important this alarm is. The higher the number, the more important the alarm. 

Note: Priority 1000 (one thousand) and above should be reserved for your most serious alarms that require immediate attention from your operators
Grouping
(Required)

This allows you to decide how you want multiple instances of this alarm to be grouped when it goes into the Alarm Processing Queue. The options are:

  • By Area
    Multiple separate alarms that are triggered for the same Area will be grouped together for the operator to process as a single event.

  • By Alarm
    Multiple instances of this specific alarm will will be grouped together for the operator to process as a single event.

  • Not Grouped
    This alarm will never be grouped with any other. Each time it's triggered it will come into the Alarm Processing Queue as a separate, individual alarm event.
Auto Handle

This allows you to set an alarm point to be Auto Handled - Where the alarm will be received and logged in the history but not shown to the operators.

 

This is usually reserved for alarms that may be useful to have in the history for reporting purposes (such as certain technical alerts) but not alarms that you would expect an operator to have to make any actionable decisions with.

SMTP Server

You can send email alarms through a normal SMTP server and treat it like a standard email. This means that any common email system such as gmail can be used to send email alarms into Sureview.

The more technical (and recommended) approach is to send email alarms directly to the appropriate SureView SMTP server using the following details:

  • SMTP Server
    The SMTP server you use depends on the customer that's using the product

    us-smtp.sureviewops.com
    The production SMTP server for our USA region - used by our AMER customers

    eu-smtp.sureviewops.com
    The production SMTP server for our EU region - used by our EMEA & APAC customers

  • SMTP Port
    587 (port 25 is also supported but many ISPs block this outgoing as it is meant for mail server-to-mail server communication only)

  • Encryption
    STARTTLS is supported if you wish to encrypt the messages from your system to SureView Response (sometimes listed as "TLS").

  • Authentication:
    None necessary (the address being sent to is used to identify the device). Note that some devices will require you to enter a username/password as authentication details even if they aren't needed. So entering any placeholder such as "username" and "password" will work.

 

 

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