System Monitor Shows Outdated Information

Symptoms

There are some situations when the System Monitor is not showing the correct information about different components of an Velocity Vision system or it freezes for several minutes while trying to load the information; for example, the disk usage of the Recording Server or its status are shown as wrong or the information is outdated.

Cause

There are two factors that are important when you are trying to find a solution to this problem.

The first factor can be the communication between the data collectors of different components and the central data collector located on the server machine. Always check if they are running using the Network Service account or, if another account is used, make sure that they are all using the same account.

The second factor can be the size of the SQL table responsible for presenting the data. The SQL table dedicated to the System Monitor (which stores all the IDs and the status of the Velocity Vision components) can become very large in some systems due to the installation size and also because of the big amounts of data which are constantly being "poured" into the table. The size of this table can sometimes cause the "freezing" in the System Monitor while it tries to load the configuration.

Troubleshooting Steps

This issue can often be solved by using the first solution and when it does not help, by using the second solution — see below.

Solution #1:

Always check that the Data Collector services are running using the Network Service account! Or, if another account is used, make sure that they are all running using the same account across all of the components of Velocity Vision. If this step has been checked in and the problem persists, proceed to the next possible solution.

Solution #2:

Important: Before proceeding with the next steps, please create a backup of your configuration from the Management Client!

Open SQL Management Studio and select the database that is in use by your Velocity Vision VMS. Right-click on it and select "New query" and in the new window type:

SELECT* FROM MONITORSTATES

Check the following screenshot:

Open

(Note: In this example my database is named "VideoOSDB1" but yours can have a different name, such as the default "Surveillance")
Then click on "Execute" (or Ctrl+E)
After bringing up the table content you can then type:

DELETE FROM MONITORSTATES

and "execute" again and the table will be cleared.

Finally, restart the data collector service on the Management Server machine and also on any other machines connected to the Management Server.

Depending on the size of your installation it will take a few minutes until the data collector gathers all the data and the information will start to appear again in the System Monitor.

For more information on rebuilding performance, please refer the following Microsoft KB article:

Manually rebuild performance counters - Windows Server

*Please note some commands should be run with the console (cmd) and some should be run with Powershell. Make sure both are run as Administrator.