Milestone XProtect Enterprise 2014 - Manual (Page 108)

Milestone XProtect ® Enterprise
2014
Administrator's Manual
www.milestonesys.com 108 Advanced configuration
Events and output
About input and output
Hardware input, such as door sensors, can be attached to input ports on hardware devices. Input
from such external hardware input units can be used for generating events in your system.
Hardware output units can be attached to output ports on many hardware devices, allowing you to
activate lights, sirens, and more from your system. Such hardware output can be activated
automatically by events, or manually from clients.
Before you specify use of hardware input and hardware output units on a hardware device, verify the
hardware device recognized the sensor operatione. Most hardware devices are capable of showing
this in their configuration interfaces, or via CGI script commands. Also check the XProtect Enterprise
release notes to verify that the hardware device and firmware used supports input and output-
controlled operations.
You do not have to configure hardware input units separately. Any hardware input units connected to
hardware devices are automatically detected when you add the hardware devices to your system. The
same goes for hardware output, but hardware output does require some simple configuration in your
system.
If you want to configure hardware output and automatically trigger output when events occur, so
that, for example, lights are switched on when a door is opened or when motion is detected in video,
see Add a hardware output (on page 111) and Configure hardware output on event (on page 113).
About events and output
You can use events and output of various types to automatically trigger actions in your system.
Examples of actions: starting or stopping recording on cameras, switching to a particular video frame
rate, triggering notifications, making PTZ cameras move to specific preset positions. You can also use
events for activating hardware output. You can also configure events and output to generate alarms.
Events can be divided in to:

Internal events (system-related): for example, motion, server responding/not responding,
archiving problems and lack of disk space.

External events (integrated): for example, MIP plug-in events.
Overview of events and output
Types of events:
Name Description
Analytics events:
Analytics events can be used as alarms and integrated seamlessly
with the Alarms feature.
Analytics events are typically data received from external third-party
video content analysis (VCA) providers. An example of a VCA-
based system could be an access control system.