Overview#
A network of 200 surveillance cameras covers a critical infrastructure site. During a night shift, one camera starts dropping frames. Another, in a physically sensitive location, shows a temperature spike and a sudden change in its defocus detection flag. Neither event triggers a visible alarm, but both are recorded in the telemetry stream. When the shift supervisor reviews the morning health report, both anomalies surface immediately. Investigation reveals that the defocus camera was deliberately obscured.
The Camera Telemetry domain makes that kind of proactive detection possible by continuously ingesting and querying real-time health metrics from every camera in the deployment.
Key Features#
- System telemetry monitoring including CPU, memory, storage usage, and temperature.
- Network health tracking with bandwidth, packet loss, and latency metrics.
- Video quality metrics including actual FPS, bitrate, dropped frames, and encoding errors.
- Detection flags for tamper, motion, and defocus events.
- Organisation-scoped access via surveillance camera join queries.
- Soft-delete awareness for camera lifecycle management.
- Configurable query limits (1-100 records per request).
- Row-level access control filtering.
Use Cases#
Security operations teams monitor surveillance camera health in real time across large deployments, identifying degraded or failed cameras before they create blind spots in coverage.
Critical infrastructure operators configure proactive alerts on defocus and tamper detection flags for cameras covering access control points, receiving notification of potential physical interference immediately rather than discovering it during post-incident review.
Facilities management teams use historical telemetry analysis to identify cameras with recurring thermal or network issues, scheduling maintenance before hardware failure disrupts operations.
Security system integrators use telemetry data during commissioning and planned maintenance to verify that all cameras are operating within specification before signing off on system health.
Integration#
Integrates with the surveillance camera domain for organisation scoping and access control. Uses shared access control utilities for row-level security filtering.
Open Standards#
- ONVIF (Open Network Video Interface Forum): Camera onboarding probes the ONVIF device service via SOAP to execute GetCapabilities, GetProfiles, and GetStreamUri, normalising the discovered RTSP paths and profile tokens into the telemetry registry.
- RTSP (RFC 2326): Telemetry ingestion tracks the real-time stream health metrics (actual FPS, bitrate, dropped frames, encoding errors) produced over RTSP streams; camera reachability is verified by issuing an RFC 2326 OPTIONS request to the camera's RTSP port.
- WS-Discovery (OASIS WS-DD): The onboarding service uses OASIS WS-Discovery multicast probes to find ONVIF-capable cameras on the local network, querying for the NetworkVideoTransmitter device type.
- WS-Security (OASIS WSS): When HTTP Basic authentication fails during ONVIF probing, the service falls back to a SOAP WS-Security UsernameToken credential block to authenticate against the camera's device service.
- ISO 8601 / RFC 3339: All telemetry timestamps (recorded_at, last_heartbeat_at, last_frame_at) are stored and exchanged as UTC-normalised ISO 8601 date-time strings, defaulting to the current UTC instant when the camera omits the field.
- GraphQL (June 2018 spec): Telemetry data is exposed to clients via a Strawberry GraphQL schema, with typed queries (cameraTelemetry) that enforce per-field resolution and permission-class authentication.
- WGS 84 (EPSG:4326): Camera position metadata (latitude, longitude, altitude) is recorded in WGS 84 decimal-degree coordinates to support geographic scoping and map-based health dashboards.
- HMAC-SHA (FIPS 198-1): Relay node control-plane calls (relay start, stop, heartbeat) are signed with an HMAC-based signature carried in the X-Surveillance-Signature header, authenticating ingestion-node-to-middleware communication.
Last Reviewed: 2026-02-24 Last Updated: 2026-04-14