Applications providing performance-based metrics are in high demand owing to the rapid growth of digital video surveillance. Life, safety, and other mission-critical applications depend upon video security systems operating at peak performance. The revenue streams of industrial machine-vision, multicast video-services, entertainment, and streaming Web video services also depend on high availability and performance.
The banking, retail, commercial and industrial sectors all have adopted digital video security systems at a breakneck pace. Unfortunately, little thought was given to assuring all system components are operating properly at all times. This responsibility has been overlooked primarily due to a lack of a comprehensive diagnostic tool.
Traditional, analog video recorders have been superseded by DVRs offering greater flexibility and functionality. However, the DVRs continue to operate as isolated components and not as an integrated system. An operator must manually verify each individual component to determine the health of the entire system. In practice, failures are discovered while attempting to retrieve data from the defective device.
It is impractical to manually monitor enterprise-scale video-security systems. Thousands of DVRs and tens of thousands of cameras cannot be effectively managed using a component-based application. A systems-based solution, like DSD™, scales to support tens of thousands of components and provides overall status and trends.
Existing applications are limited to monitoring basic operating parameters and are more concerned with ensuring network health than good image rendition. In addition to providing system-wide visibility, DSD ™ also reveals detailed operating information. For example, it does not simply report if a camera is dead or alive but indicates if the image quality is acceptable or if the camera has been displaced from its original position.
