Sentinel Native

Overview

Monitor Computer Systems Ltd. has been a premier supplier of alarm monitoring systems to the UK market and abroad since its founding in 1984. Giraffe have an extensive integration with Sentinel supporting almost all functionality of the Edge Controller.

• Live view (via secure RTSPS)

• Alarm notifications with snapshots

• Audio talkdown

• PTZ Control

• Outputs (strobes, floodlights, siren)

• Arm / disarm

• Get Configuration

The integration is almost fully automated. You simply need to create a new transmitter record in Sentinel, give it a Giraffe system ID and press Get Configuration. No other steps are required.

Supported Sentinel version

Initial support was released in Sentinel version 3.154.

There are a couple of problems with the dropdown boxes for HD / SD / Thermal streams reverting to numbers in the current version that will be fixed in the next release.

API key creation

For each alarm receiving centre, it is necessary to get an API key for Giraffe Cloud that Sentinel will use to communicate with our API.

We recommend creating a user within Giraffe Cloud called [e-mail] or similar. This user can then be used to create the API key.

This way, when a customer wants you to monitor their system, they simply need to invite the [e-mail] user to their team within Giraffe.

Any interactions that the ARC makes via Sentinel will show up in the Giraffe event logs as coming from the [e-mail] user.

Sentinel initial setup

To configure your Sentinel instance to receive alarms from Giraffe, please refer to Sentinel's own documentation.

Adding a system to Sentinel

1) Create a new customer / site record in Sentinel in the normal way.

2) Create a new transmitter record as per the below screenshot.

• The Type must be set to Giraffe

• The ID must be set to the system ID from Giraffe Cloud that you are trying to monitor

• The ARC user must have access to the system in Giraffe Cloud

• The Monitoring Service must be set to External Video Monitoring

3) Press the Get Configuration button.

The details of the system will be pulled from Giraffe Cloud.

• Only streams that are actually available for each camera will be returned. `HD `is the highest quality stream and SD is the lowest. Some cameras will also have a Thermal stream available.

• If the system has speakers or controllable features such as strobelights or floodlights, these will show up as well.

Press save when you are happy with the naming of the cameras.

4) You can now view the cameras by pressing the Open CCTV button (orange in the below screenshot).

5) Drag the transmitter onto the live view screen in the normal way.

• If the cameras are slow to load, check that you are requesting the SD streams and not the HD streams in the camera configuration in Sentinel.

• You can activate the floodlights or strobe lights by clicking the appropriate button. By default the output will stay on permanently but this can be configured in the Giraffe configuration file within Sentinel.

• The system can be armed and disarmed by clicking the "shield" icon next to the system name. This is equivalent to pressing the arm / disarm button in Giraffe Cloud.

• You can perform talk down in the normal way or send a prerecorded audio clip. The amplifer will be activated on the Edge Controller first if required.

Sendign alarms to Sentinel

In order to send alarms to Sentinel, you must select 'Sentinel Native' as the ARC integration type.

Sentinel Native is different to Sentinel

The 'ARC Identity' field must be set to the same as the System ID. This is going to be updated shortly to automatically set it.

The SMTP details should be matched to your Sentinel server ones.

Testing

You can easily test any individual event type by copying from the examples below and pasting them into the test email feature on the ARC configuration screen.

For instance, if you want to test a mains failure alarm, you would need to send the following text:

SiteID=YOUR_SITE_ID_HERE | EventType=CCTV | Event=PowerLoss | Text=Auxilliary power disconnected | LinkUrl=https://app.onvp.io

IP Whitelisting

All of the connections to Sentinel will come from our gateway IPs defined on the firewall whitelisting page.

Events sent to Sentinel

This section of the docs is still a work in progress

Up to five snapshot images will be attached to the email sent to Sentinel. These images will be named with the timestamp they were each taken like in the following photo:

The Giraffe platform will wait for 30s after an initial event is received for the snapshots to be received. As soon as 5 snapshots are received, the Giraffe platform will immediately forward the event to Sentinel.

If the 5 snapshots have not been received within 30s, the Giraffe platform will forward the event to Sentinel anyway with whatever snapshots it has received. The Giraffe platform will not attempt to resend the snapshots if they are subsequently received later.