Alerts are a powerful tool to reduce the time required to monitor your organization. When configured properly, alerts allow you to focus your attention on the events that matter to your organization and proactively resolve issues before they turn into larger problems.

If you have many devices, however, the total number of alerts you receive can be overwhelming. Below are a few suggestions to reduce the number of alerts that you receive.

Select sites and devices with care

For some events, such as tamper for cameras or open for access control, you might experience a few devices that emit a lot of the events. In that case, these events are usually less interesting, as they happen regularly and rarely require anyone's attention. When setting up alerts for those events using an Alert, you can un-select devices that emit a lot of events from the alert. That way, you’ll receive fewer notifications from the alert and can focus on events that actually require investigation.

Select a time period

Many organizations are only interested in alerts during a certain time period, such as the night or weekends. When setting up an alert, you can customize the time period when the alert notifies you to avoid receiving alerts at a time when you don’t want to.

Configure your motion and tamper events per camera

The type of motion events that are detected should be configured per camera. Each camera has a distinct position and view and therefore requires a specific configuration to generate the right events. For example, if you only are interested in people or vehicles, you can significantly reduce the number of events emitted by selecting People and Vehicle detection on the camera. Similarly, if you only care about motion in a specific region of the camera, you should enable Specify Region to only focus on a subset of the camera’s field of vision. Some cameras monitor areas that are busy by day but should be empty at night. For these cameras, you should limit the time period when events are being generated. For more information on how to configure motion events, click here.

For tamper events, you should experiment with the sensitivity of the tamper detection, based on how much vibration the camera experiences. For cameras in high-vibration areas, it might be better to turn off tamper detection altogether to avoid uninteresting alerts. For more information on how to configure tamper events, click here.

Review your alerts in batches

Sometimes you don’t need to act on the alert as it happens, but want to see a summary at the end of the day or week. In this case, you can set up alerts to go to your email only, and direct Verkada alerts to a specific folder. Then you can review the contents of your folder at a time that suits you, instead of having to react to each new alert.

Alerts are an essential part of modern monitoring workflows, but they need to be manageable in order to be used. By following the steps above, you should be able to ensure you receive the alerts you need, without getting overwhelmed by the total alert volume.