Working with Storage¶
A video management system has a habit of consuming a lot of storage. As the administrator for a VMS, it's important to be able to understand the state of your servers and storage, and draw useful insights about your past and future usage.
The Management Client and XProtect Smart Client offer some of these insights through the System Monitor. However, you may need a more specific view of your environment or the ability to push data into external tools such as Grafana, Power BI, and so on.
What data is available to you?¶
The MIP SDK offers access to a lot of information about your storage configuration and devices, but there are some gaps. Here's a simplistic breakdown of what data you can, and can't read through the MIP SDK or MilestonePSTools.
Possible
- Read total used bytes per camera
- Read total used bytes per storage or archive
Not possible
- Read total used bytes per camera, per storage
You may have noticed that the Management Client offers a view of how much data a camera has sitting in each storage or archive location. You'll find this on the Record tab of a camera, microphone, speaker, or metadata device.
As it stands today, this table is populated by an internal API call which is not available through MIP SDK. If you discover otherwise, please let us know and we'll update this guide!
Accessing Storage and ArchiveStorage Information¶
There is a method on the Storage class in MIP SDK called ReadStorageInformation()
but it's not immediately obvious how to use the resulting ServerTask object. It
appears to provide you with only a State value indicating whether the
request succeeded, and a Path like
StorageInformation[444b824b-1ec4-4c4b-9a5a-c3932b664096] along with a couple
other properties.
However, there are a few useful methods on the ServerTask object including
GetPropertyKeys() and GetProperty([string]). The following table was
produced by a script which uses ReadStorageInformation() and the similar
ReadArchiveStorageInformation() methods to retrieve the total used disk
space, in bytes, for each storage and child archive-storage.
| RecordingServer | Name | Path | MaxSize | UsedSpace | LockedUsedSpace |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC2AMAZ-4JLP3R3 | Local default | C:\MediaDatabase\444B824B-1EC4-4C4B-9A5A-C3932B664096|1073741824000 | 98566144 | 0 | |
| EC2AMAZ-4JLP3R3 | Archive 1 | C:\mediadatabase\81F9AAB4-F8C3-4954-A31A-F0021D0450CA|1073741824000 | 0 | 0 |
Example¶
The function below demonstrates how you can use MilestonePSTools to generate
this report. To use it, add it to the top of your script and call it
using Get-VmsStorageInfo.
Note
Make sure to install MilestonePSTools first, and to
connect to the management server using Connect-Vms.
function Get-VmsStorageInfo {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Gets information about used disk space for each storage and archive
.DESCRIPTION
Each storage and archive object in a Milestone VMS is able to return a
UsedSpace property and depending on your VMS version, a LockedUsedSpace
property indicating how much overall storage space is used by that
storage area, and how much data is "Evidence Locked", respectively.
.PARAMETER RecordingServer
Specifies one or more RecordingServer objects as returned by Get-VmsRecordingServer.
Omit this property and data will be returned for all recording servers.
.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-VmsStorageInfo | Export-Csv -Path ~\Desktop\StorageReport.csv -NoTypeInformation
Returns a collection of properties for each storage and archive storage on
the recording server named 'MyRecorder'. The properties returned include
- RecordingServer - the display name of the recording server
- Storage - the name of the storage configuration with recording and optional archive paths
- IsDefault - True if the default storage for the recording server
- Name - "Recording" for the live recording path and the display name of archives if present
- Path - disk path, relative to the recording server
- MaxSizeGB - the maximum size in bytes configured for the storage area in gigabytes
- UsedSpace - the total used space, in gigabytes
- LockedUsedSpace - the amount of data "locked" by evidence locks in gigabytes
The results are piped to Export-Csv so that they can be easily reviewed
and manipulated in your office suite of choice.
Note: You must have MilestonePSTools installed, and you must connect to
a management server using Connect-Vms before calling this
function.
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(ValueFromPipeline)]
[VideoOS.Platform.ConfigurationItems.RecordingServer[]]
$RecordingServer
)
process {
if ($null -eq $RecordingServer -or $RecordingServer.Count -eq 0) {
$RecordingServer = Get-VmsRecordingServer
}
foreach ($recorder in $RecordingServer) {
foreach ($storage in $recorder | Get-VmsStorage) {
$info = $storage.ReadStorageInformation()
$usedSpace = $info.GetProperty('UsedSpace') -as [double]
$lockedUsedSpace = 0
if ($info.GetPropertyKeys() -contains 'LockedUsedSpace') {
$lockedUsedSpace = $info.GetProperty('LockedUsedSpace') -as [double]
}
[pscustomobject]@{
RecordingServer = $recorder.Name
Storage = $storage.Name
IsDefault = $storage.IsDefault
Name = 'Recording'
Path = [io.path]::Combine($storage.DiskPath, $storage.Id)
MaxSizeGB = $storage.MaxSize / 1024
UsedSpaceGB = $usedSpace / 1024
LockedUsedSpaceGB = $lockedUsedSpace / 1024
}
Remove-Variable info, usedSpace, lockedUsedSpace
foreach ($archive in $storage | Get-VmsArchiveStorage) {
$info = $archive.ReadArchiveStorageInformation()
$usedSpace = $info.GetProperty('UsedSpace') -as [double]
$lockedUsedSpace = 0
if ($info.GetPropertyKeys() -contains 'LockedUsedSpace') {
$lockedUsedSpace = $info.GetProperty('LockedUsedSpace') -as [double]
}
[pscustomobject]@{
RecordingServer = $recorder.Name
Storage = $storage.Name
IsDefault = $storage.IsDefault
Name = $archive.Name
Path = [io.path]::Combine($archive.DiskPath, $archive.Id)
MaxSizeGB = $archive.MaxSize / 1024
UsedSpaceGB = $usedSpace / 1024
LockedUsedSpaceGB = $lockedUsedSpace / 1024
}
}
}
}
}
}
Accessing Per-Camera Information¶
To access the amount of disk space used for each camera, we need to use the
RecorderStatusService2 interface to ask the recording server(s) directly.
Specifically, we can use the GetVideoDeviceStatistics() method which accepts
a Milestone "token" like TOKEN#526b9610-0541-44e2-b50d-1aea51a45ed5#ec2amaz-4jlp3r3//ServerConnector#
and an array of [guid] objects representing the ID's of one or more cameras.
In the sample function below, we also use the Get-IServerCommandService
cmdlet to access a simplified view of the VMS configuration. This isn't
necessary - we could get all the camera ID's by using ($recorder | Get-VmsHardware | Get-VmsCamera).Id
but on a larger system this can take longer than necessary to complete due to
the large number of Configuration API requests made to retrieve all the
properties of the hardware objects in addition to the camera objects.
By using the IServerCommandService interface, we make a single configuration
request which gives us enough information to know which cameras are on which
recording servers.
With these tools available to us, we can produce a report like you see in the table below.
| RecordingServer | CameraName | CameraId | UsedSpaceInBytes |
|---|---|---|---|
| EC2AMAZ-4JLP3R3 | Big Buck Bunny Demo - Camera 1 | 50277b73-9fd8-4aca-bde4-752a479e833c | 161445304 |
Example¶
As with the previous example, you can add this function to your script and call
it using Get-VmsCameraStorageInfo. See the examples in the comment-based help
and again - make sure you have MilestonePSTools installed, and you are
connected to a management server by using Connect-Vms.
function Get-VmsCameraStorageInfo {
<#
.SYNOPSIS
Gets information about total used disk space for each camera
.DESCRIPTION
The RecorderStatusService2 interface allows you to retrieve basic
camera statistics including used disk space and stream information. This
function uses the interface to produce a table of cameras and the total
used disk space in bytes for each of them.
.PARAMETER RecordingServer
Specifies one or more RecordingServer objects as returned by Get-VmsRecordingServer.
Omit this property and data will be returned for all recording servers.
.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-VmsCameraStorageInfo | Export-Csv -Path ~\Desktop\CameraStorageReport.csv -NoTypeInformation
Returns a collection of properties for each camera on each recording server
including:
- RecordingServer - the display name of the recording server
- CameraName - the display name of the camera
- CameraId - a GUID identifier for the camera
- UsedSpaceInBytes - the total used space in bytes across all storage and archive paths
Note: You must have MilestonePSTools installed, and you must connect to
a management server using Connect-Vms before calling this
function.
.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-VmsCameraStorageInfo | Out-GridView
Presents the same data as in the first example, except in an interactive
GridView interface which can be sorted and filtered.
.EXAMPLE
PS C:\> Get-VmsRecordingServer -Name 'MyRecorder' | Get-VmsCameraStorageInfo | Out-GridView
Presents all cameras from the recording server named 'MyRecorder' in a
GridView.
#>
[CmdletBinding()]
param(
[Parameter(ValueFromPipeline)]
[VideoOS.Platform.ConfigurationItems.RecordingServer[]]
$RecordingServer
)
begin {
try {
$config = (Get-IServerCommandService -ErrorAction Stop).GetConfiguration((Get-VmsToken))
}
catch {
throw
}
}
process {
if ($null -eq $RecordingServer -or $RecordingServer.Count -eq 0) {
$RecordingServer = Get-VmsRecordingServer
}
foreach ($recorder in $RecordingServer) {
$cameraMap = @{}
($config.Recorders | Where-Object RecorderId -eq ([guid]$recorder.Id)).Cameras | Foreach-Object {
$cameraMap[$_.DeviceId] = $_
}
$deviceIds = ($config.Recorders | Where-Object RecorderId -eq ([guid]$recorder.Id)).Cameras.DeviceId
try {
$svc = $recorder | Get-RecorderStatusService2
$svc.GetVideoDeviceStatistics((Get-VmsToken), $deviceIds) | Foreach-Object {
[pscustomobject]@{
RecordingServer = $recorder.Name
CameraName = $cameraMap[$_.DeviceId].Name
CameraId = $_.DeviceId
UsedSpaceInBytes = $_.UsedSpaceInBytes
}
}
}
finally {
if ($svc) {
$svc.Dispose()
$svc = $null
}
}
}
}
}