Daily Statistics Email

CNorris

I'm running v4.2.6 of SS and have enabled Daily Statistics emails - which I find really useful. (And as an aside, I'm very pleased with how straightforward and capable SS is).

This morning I noticed that the email reported "100% uptime" on all cameras, even though I was doing some work on the server Mac and restarted both SS and the Mac a few times, resulting in several minutes of definite downtime.

Am I missing a setting somewhere, perhaps, that would more accurately reflect the actual uptime in the daily statistics email? In this case I knew the sever was down because I rebooted it, but if there had been a power outage (server is set to come back up automatically) I might not know there is a gap in video coverage.

Thanks for any thoughts!

Ben

The uptime measure is the time that the camera is online while SecuritySpy is open.

So if you have SecuritySpy open only for 1 hour per day, and all cameras are online during this time, then the uptime would be reported as 100%.

In this way, the uptime is a measure of the reliability of the cameras - i.e. if they are online when they should be online - and if this value is lower than 100% then this indicates a potential problem (e.g. with the cameras or the network). If this stat were measured how you were expecting (i.e. throughout the whole day, whether SecuritySpy is open or not), then a figure less than 100% wouldn't necessarily indicate a problem - it could simply be that SecuritySpy was quit and reopened by the user or by the Mac restarting. So I believe that the way it is now is the most useful way to measure this value.

Perhaps it would be useful to you to add an additional measure to the stats email: the amount of time that SecuritySpy was actually open and running throughout the day?

CNorris

Yes, some indication that a particular day did not have 100% of the planned coverage would be great!

I see the value in the existing uptime and agree that's best as is. The solution you described would work great for me - namely for when I'm out of town, I'd have some indication that there was a power failure (or someone had rebooted the system).

Thank you for the followup.

TSI

I wonder if it would it be possible to add a setting to delay the time of day that the status email goes out? It wakes me up at midnight. I agree that it would be nice to have the report indicate if the software crashed or was commanded to quit and with what password.

CNorris

In GMail, I'm using custom rules to filter for the exact subject line from the emails, mark them as 'read' and then route them to a folder so the new mail alerts are bypassed and all the SS statistics are easy to find.

Maybe other email clients have similar options?

Ben

I have now added a new "software uptime" item to the daily stats email, in the latest beta version of SecuritySpy (currently 4.2.7b5).

So please run this for a few days and confirm this works as expected. The first day you install this new version you won't get this value in the stats email because there won't be enough data yet to calculate it - you'll get it on the second day onwards.

CNorris

Brilliant, thank you Ben!

CNorris

After running the beta for a few days I can confirm it's working nicely. I purposefully did a quick reboot one day and ran the production version for part of another day (then went back to the beta) and the statistics seemed to report both events as expected.

Curiously, the Storage portion of the reports added the free and total GB for the current logged in user the first few days (and different numbers from the boot volume), then it disappeared (perhaps coinciding with the reboot). Example:

- curtnorris: 57.3 GB free of 121 GB total
- Macintosh HD: 94.8 GB free of 159 GB total
- NVR Test: 745 GB free of 999 GB total

Not good or bad to me, just thought it might be helpful to know.

Ben

Great to hear it's working as expected.

With the storage, SecuritySpy will report on all mounted volumes/drives. For the days when some drives were missing from the stats email, it could have been that they were simply not mounted at the time.

CNorris

Ah, okay. I probably had a network volume mounted (that would make sense with the name and space that was shown) which, of course, was unmounted at reboot.