ARC integration

The Giraffe Cloud is integrated with both Sentinel and Immix alarm receiving centre software. We can also integrated with other alarm receiving centre software.

Overview of how the integrations work

Direct integration

In a direct integration, all communication is handled via Giraffe Cloud. You simply need to share a few simple details with the ARC.

Please see the below diagram for details:

Third party integration

In a third party integration, you connect the cameras direct to the ARC without involving Giraffe. You setup your own alerts on the cameras and forward these direct to the ARC using existing integrations the ARC has with your camera.

Video streams are pulled directly from the camera without any involvement from Giraffe other than potentially providing VPN connectivity.

Giraffe can optionally forward 'health' alarms to the ARC from the Edge Controller. These are sent as a simple SMTP format that any ARC should be able to understand.

Please see the following diagram for details:

Notification settings

The notification settings for the ARC work almost exactly the same as for a user notification and the instructions can be referred to.

The only difference is that you do not need to enable alerts at the individual user level. If the notifications are enabled on the Edge Controller level, they will be sent to the ARC.

Rate limits

Unlike normal notifications, the rate limit for ARC integrations allows a lot of object detection events to be sent in a short period of time. We do this to reduce the risk of us rate limiting a genuine alarm. This can result in a lot of traffic being sent to the ARC if a camera is badly configured.

Event Type	Rate Limit
PIR sensors	1 notification per minute
Wireless PIR sensors	1 notification per minute
Objection detection	1 notification every 10 seconds
All other event types	No rate limit

Please see the rate limits page for more details on how the system works.