How can I share a group of cameras?

Camera Groups

Each camera can be assigned groups.

For example, say you have these two G Suite Groups that control access to all the cameras at each of these two locations, and each location has 3 cameras:

Engineering Department Cameras (eng-cams@univ.edu) Biochemistry Department Cameras (bio-cams@univ.edu)
  1. Eng South Entrance
  2. Eng North Entrance
  3. Eng DARPA Lab
  1. Bio South Entrance
  2. Bio East Entrance
  3. Bio DNA Lab


Access to all the cameras is controlled by the Groups eng-cams@univ.edu and bio-cams@univ.edu. The problem is that you may want to share only the building entrance cameras with security staff without including the DARPA Lab or the DNA Lab cameras.

To share only the entrance cameras with the Security Staff group, you assign the Group security@univ.edu to those 4 cameras using the groups field of each camera. Newly arriving Events from those cameras are then indexed with those assigned groups.

Searching by Camera Group

In the example, above, everyone in the Group security@univ.edu can see all Event across both accounts with the query:

https://camio.com/app/#search;q=security

The Group name "security" will appear in the search box auto-complete for the members of that group. Anyone who isn't a member of the Group named security will see only their regular account results.

camera: and user: search operators

When you click on a camera name in the search results to constrain the results only to that particular camera, you'll see both the camera and user added to the search box. For example, if you click on Eng North Entrance, then your search box will look like this:

security camera:"Eng North Entrance" user:gd:xyz1592

You're still authorized to access the Events via your membership in the security Group. However both the camera: and user: search operators are added to know the intended camera, because two different user accounts may have created cameras with the same name.

Prerequisites

Camera Groups require that you configure your Domain for G Suite Directory API access so that Camio can lookup Group memberships.

If you don't use G Suite Directory, then contact us to set up your domain Groups within Camio.

Domain Camera Group

Camera Groups are typically assigned at the individual camera level to share subsets of cameras across accounts. However, if you need to share all cameras across all accounts of your domain (e.g. for the staff of a centralized Security Operations Center), then you can specify a domain-wide Camera Group at https://camio.com/domains.

For example, if you have 1,200 cameras in 14 locations, you can enter a single Domain Camera Group soc@acme.com to grant all members of that group access to all 1,200 cameras. This avoids your having to specify the groups field of each individual camera to accomplish the same effect.

The final keyword

When using a Domain Camera Group, you may still want to exclude a subset of the cameras from the domain-wide sharing. For example, let's say only 2 of the 1,200 cameras were so private that not even soc@acme.com  should have access. In that case, you can use the keyword final as the value for groups of those private cameras to prevent those cameras from inheriting the Domain Camera Group. So be sure to apply the final keyword to the private cameras before setting a Domain Camera Group.

Here are examples of the effective camera groups based on Domain Camera Group and the Camera's own groups.

Domain Camera Group Camera groups Effective camera groups
soc@acme.com   soc@acme.com
soc@acme.com final  
soc@acme.com it@acme.com soc@acme.com, it@acme.com
soc@acme.com final it@acme.com it@acme.com

 

 

 

 

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