Reliability
The parts that run while nobody is watching
Most of the engineering is not in the happy path. It is in day two hundred, when a disk is nearly full, a node has died and the person who installed the system has left. Retention, storage pressure, clock drift, index repair and restarts are handled by the system, measured and reported.
Upkeep
Day two hundred
Thresholds from measurement
The storage guard forecasts how many days of retention the free space buys, from each camera’s measured bytes per day. A dry run shows what a cleanup would remove before it removes anything.
Repair, not just restart
A node agent on every machine restarts any part that dies, and the operating system supervises the agent. A nightly check finds a damaged day of metadata, which one command restores from the node catalogues.
Nothing to bloat
Metadata is partitioned by day, so no file grows without end. A site needs no database server. A hub that consolidates many sites can keep its store in PostgreSQL, a schema per day, dropped whole when it expires.
Keep what matters longer
Footage is kept for its base retention, and footage with confirmed activity in chosen zones for longer: the person at the door, not the traffic on the road beyond it. Nothing is re-encoded.
Low-resolution history
A camera’s sub stream can be recorded beside the main one and kept longer, so footage whose full recording has been pruned still plays at lower resolution.
Upkeep you can see
Clock sync, the storage guard, backups, store checks, certificate renewal and camera settings checks run as routines, each with a schedule, a run history and a run-now button in the console.
Evidence
Footage you can defend
Hashes from the moment of writing
Each segment’s SHA-256 is recorded as it is written. An export carries a manifest with those hashes, its own hash, who exported it, when, and the time range.
Holds that retention obeys
An evidential hold on a camera’s time range is never deleted, whatever the retention setting or the disk pressure. It can be tied to a case and given an expiry.
Cases
Investigators keep what they find in cases, with snapshots of what each one contains, and close and reopen them as the work goes on.
An audit log
Exports, shares, holds, tag edits, sign-ins, PTZ commands, sound switches and changes to shared views are all recorded.
Security
Security, observability and governance
Security
TLS on the API and on the uplinks between sites and hub. An uplink without TLS to a public address is refused unless it is declared to run over a VPN or private circuit. Viewer, operator and admin roles, passwords hashed with PBKDF2-SHA256, and sessions as signed tokens. Secrets live only in the environment, cameras sit on their own VLAN, and share links are signed, scoped, expiring and revocable.
Observability
Heartbeats every 10 seconds carry how busy each node’s processor, GPU and disks are. Alerts raise and clear, metrics come out in Prometheus format, and there is a health endpoint, bus consumer lag and a storage forecast.
Governance
Retention per camera, kept longer where there was activity that matters. Sound is kept and heard only where it is switched on, AI is local first, and footage stays on the site that recorded it.
Standards
Our code inside, published standards at the boundary
Where Rutba Vision meets cameras, browsers, networks and the systems you already run, it speaks published standards. A recorded segment or an export is an MP4 file that plays on its own. Events arrive as ordinary MQTT messages and signed webhooks, and cameras connect over RTSP, with ONVIF and Hikvision cameras set and steered through their own interfaces.
Ours by default, borrowed at the edges
Everything that defines how video enters, is stored, moves, is analysed, is found and leaves is our code: the bus, the media relay, the recorder, the store, the rules, the search and the console. Four engines are borrowed where rebuilding them is unreasonable, for pixel work, inference, the HTTP layer and reading the configuration. Each is reached through one module of ours, so replacing it means replacing that module.
Ask us about your oldest site
The hardest part of a camera estate is usually the box nobody has touched in years. Tell us what it is and we will tell you plainly what moving it involves.