User manual

Getting around

Sentinel runs in your web browser. The tabs across the top are Dashboard, Live, Alert Review, Playback, Events & Smart Search, Faces, Plates (LPR), Cameras, Sites & Compliance, Heatmaps, Health, Remote Access, Audit, Branding and About, plus Industry packs, Settings, Weather, Updates and License. A POS tab appears when a register feed is set up. What you can open depends on your role (see Users and roles).

The Dashboard shows live alerts, a multi-site overview, cameras online and storage at a glance.

Live view

• Layouts: choose 1, 4, 6, 9, 16, 25 or 32 cameras with the buttons at the top. Sentinel remembers your last layout.
• Full screen: double-click a tile. Double-click again to go back.
• One camera: click the ◱ icon on a tile for a single-camera view, then Full quality to switch from the lighter grid stream to the camera's main stream. Back to grid returns you to the layout.
• Arrange tiles: drag and drop tiles to reorder them. The order is saved for you and for that layout. Use Reset layout to go back to the default order.
• Fill or fit: every camera fills its tile by default. If you'd rather see the whole picture with bars, set that camera to Fit in its recording settings.
• Detection markers: when S.I. sees something, an arrow callout with a label points to it. Colors show the type: people yellow, vehicles blue, animals green, packages and objects orange. Red is reserved for weapon and lockdown alerts. An admin can switch to boxes, or arrows plus boxes, in Settings, and each camera can override that.
• Tile badges: a tile can show its industry-pack symbol and state badge. A camera beyond your license's camera count shows an over license limit notice instead of video.
• PTZ: click a tile to select it, then use the arrows, Zoom +, Zoom − and Go preset in the PTZ panel.
• Talk: on cameras with a speaker, press and hold Hold to talk to speak through the camera.
• Register text: if a POS register is linked to a camera, the receipt text appears over that camera's tile.

Playback

1. Pick a camera and a date, then click Load.
2. Click the timeline to play. Recorded stretches are shaded and yellow ticks mark events. Use Zoom in and Zoom out to move between the whole day and a few minutes.
3. Change speed with the 0.5× to 8× buttons.

• Several cameras at once: click Synced multi-camera ▸ to play up to 9 cameras on one clock.
• Jump from an event: click any snapshot on the Dashboard, Events or Alert Review pages to see it full size, then Play this moment to start playback 3 seconds before it.
• The current minute is still being written. If you click it, Sentinel opens it a few seconds later on its own.
• Browsers without H.265: Sentinel converts H.265 recordings to H.264 automatically so they still play. See H.265 errors.

Exporting clips

1. Play the recording and pause at the moment the clip should start.
2. Choose a length in the Export / share clip panel: 30 s, 60 s or 2 min from the current position.
3. Click Download to save an MP4 file, or Share… to send it with your device's share menu (where the browser supports it).

Every export is recorded in the Audit log. Exports from an unlicensed (evaluation) install are watermarked, and DEMO video carries a DEMO watermark.

Events & Smart Search

• Filters: pick a camera, an event type (person, vehicle, animal, line cross, intrusion, loitering, motion, plate and more), a vehicle or animal type, and a time range (last hour, 24 hours or 7 days), then click Search.
• Smart search: type what you're looking for in plain English, such as “people in Lobby last hour”, “cars at Parking Lot today” or “alerts this week”, and click Smart search. Clothing and vehicle colors work too, such as “red shirt” or “white pickup”.
• Play all results: click ▶ Play all results for a quick reel of the matches.
• S.I.-verified only: tick this to hide camera-made events that S.I. didn't confirm. Events from the cameras themselves (motion, line cross, intrusion) are marked verified only when S.I. saw a person or vehicle nearby at that time.

Alerts

• On screen: new alerts pop up in every open Sentinel window and appear under Live alerts on the Dashboard.
• Alert Review: the queue shows each alert with its snapshot and whether S.I. saw a person or vehicle. Click Confirm or False alarm to clear it. The buttons at the top switch between new, confirmed, false alarm and all. The counters show how many raw camera triggers were held back because S.I. saw no person or vehicle.
• Email: Sentinel can email alerts by event type and camera through your own mail server. Your installer or J&J Technical Services support sets up the mail server and the alert rules for you.
• Phone: the phone version at /m has an alert list. Each site can be armed or disarmed there. A disarmed site still logs events but doesn't send alerts.
• System alerts: Sentinel alerts you when a camera goes offline or storage runs low.
• Weather: once an admin sets the site's location in Settings > Weather, active National Weather Service watches, warnings and advisories show as a banner and on the Weather page. Tornado and Severe Thunderstorm Warnings also raise a Sentinel alert. Official alerts come from the National Weather Service. This isn't a substitute for NWS alerts, a weather radio or local sirens, and Sentinel never issues weather warnings of its own.

Masked Areas

A Masked Area tells S.I. to ignore part of a camera's picture, such as a flag, a busy road or a beehive that a shadow makes look like a tool. Detections inside a Masked Area aren't shown and don't create events or alerts. The camera still records the whole picture, and weapon and other safety alerts are never masked.

Draw a Masked Area

1. Open Cameras and click Masked Areas next to the camera.
2. Outline the area. Click points on the picture around the spot (at least 3). Undo point removes the last point and Clear starts over.
3. Name it and choose what it applies to. Type a name (for example “Beehive”). Under Applies to, keep All classes or pick one kind of object, such as person, car or dog, so only that kind is ignored there.
4. Click Close shape & save. The area shows shaded on the picture and in the list below it, where you can Edit or Delete it. Click Done when you're finished.

Mask this spot from an event

On a false alert in Events & Smart Search, or in the phone alert list, click Mask this spot. Sentinel masks that object's spot on that camera so it stops making events there. Click Undo right away if you change your mind, or delete it later in the camera's Masked Areas list. Weapon and lockdown events don't offer this button.

Static objects

The same dialog has a Static objects setting: no new alert for the same object that hasn't moved for a set time (Off, 30 min, 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, 12 h or 24 h; 2 h is the default). A parked car stops re-alerting, but weapons always alert and animals are never suppressed, so a goat back in its usual spot still counts.

Faces, plates, Sky Watch and the phone app

• Faces: face recognition is off by default and follows your site's state privacy preset. Where it's allowed and turned on, you can keep watchlists, enroll a face from a sighting, search faces and get unknown-face alerts. Every enrollment and search is audit-logged.
• Plates (LPR): plate reading is switched on per camera and needs a camera aimed and focused for plates. A wide overview camera won't read them reliably. The Plates page keeps a plate log with snapshots, hotlists and allowlists, plate alerts and cross-site plate search.
• Heatmaps: show where people and vehicles spend time, from S.I. tracks.
• Sky Watch Preview: off by default. An admin turns it on in Settings and marks which cameras face the sky. It tags aircraft, drones, unknown moving lights, meteors and Starlink-style satellite trains. Drones and unknown lights alert by default; the rest are log only. It's identification help only: Sky Watch may miss or mislabel objects, so verify before acting.
• Phone app: open /m on your phone (for example http://<Sentinel PC address>:8000/m on the local network, or through Remote Access). It has the camera grid, site list, arm and disarm, snapshots, layouts, talk and alerts, and you can add it to your home screen.