Vision Portal Integrations: Access Control
Introduction
You can now navigate physical access control events associated with your cameras in the Meraki Vision Portal.
Meraki Vision is a camera-viewing portal designed for core physical security use cases. It allows you to easily navigate between cameras to view video, conduct motion search, and share footage. With physical access control integration, you also can now easily:
- Find and view events of persons trying to enter your facilities
- See and respond to monitor points for doors, windows, controllers and other hardware
- Remotely unlock doors for visitors or staff
- Navigate to key resources (users, doors, controllers) inside your physical access control system when needed
You can navigate to the portal by going to vision.meraki.com and using your Meraki dashboard credentials to sign in.
Key Features
Physical Access control integration into Vision Portal introduces these new capabilities
- See it, search it
- Access control events visible on camera timeline
- Searchable access control event activity log
- View event details for complete context
- Response in real-time
- Remotely unlock doors instantly with the click of a button
- New events are shown in real-time using Webhooks
- Historical events are fetched alongside video for improved investigations
- Simplicity at scale
- Link your MV Camera Networks and Access Control Solution easily using our open API
- Configurable for the entire Organization
- Pair one or more cameras to each door
- Toggle on/off certain features (with more to come!)
Tour of the Interface
Default Vision Portal Experience
Once in the Vision Portal, use the left-side menu to select the desired MV camera network, browse and select cameras to view, create and review video walls, and manage exported footage.
The left navigation pane provides a mini-map and list view of each camera in the network. A search bar is available to input a name or tag information to search for a specific camera. Once a specific camera is selected, a focused view of that camera's stream is displayed on the Video Player.
The Video Actions menu at the top right allows you manage motion events, exports, and the sharing of video clips or streams.
The Video Timeline at the bottom of the Vision Portal is helpful when searching for historical video or motion events.
Camera View With Access Control Integration Enabled
Once the Access Control integration is enabled in the Vision Portal, the Video Timeline can also be used to help search for historical Access Control events.
The Video Actions menu at the top right now offers an additional option to manage Access Control events. Detailed access control event information is shown when the Event details drawer is opened, displaying details such as Event description, Access groups, Timestamp of event, and more.
Navigate to Access Control > Activity log to search for and review all access control events for the selected camera.
Navigate to Access Control > Controls to remotely control access to associated doors. To remotely grant access, click the Allow access action button.
How-Tos
Set Up the Integration
App Selection and API Key Registration
In order to get started, select the partner application inside the Organization > Configure > Integrations page.
Once the app is selected, you will need to proceed through the setup prompts (unique to each partner application, see below for more details.)
App Permissions
Permissions for access control features are adjusted within the app integration view, after the application has been added.
- Read mappings of cameras to doors (required)
- Read door, user attributes, and access control events (required)
By default, each access control integration requires common read-only permissions for user, door, and controller access event types (naming may differ per partner application.) These are visibile in a read-only state to inform administrators this behavior is on by default for all users of Vision Portal.
- Issue commands to access control devices - on/off (off by default)
Administrators can turn on/off the ability for all users with camera viewing permissions to remotely unlock associated doors. This is a global configuration and cannot be granted to specific users or groups today.
Genea Security
For additional information, see the Genea Security ecosystem partner application page in the Cisco Meraki Marketplace.
Adding the Genea Security App Integration
The Genea Security application details page is seen below after selecting it from the Organization > Configure > Integration page's apps list. Select the Add button and enter your API key.
Once you have completed the addition of the Genea Security app integration, you can adjust the available Scope permissions for the application and can navigate the mappings of cameras to physical security resources, as defined inside the Genea Security application. If this list is empty, follow these steps to configure the Meraki Integration inside of Genea and map MV cameras to physical security resources. Then, return to the app integration page for Genea Security depicted above and click the Refresh data button to populate, review, and verify your resource mappings are working as expected.
Creating a Genea API Key
This API key must first be created inside of the Genea platform and will require at minimum the following permissions to operate correctly:
| Permission Group | Permission | Access Level |
|---|---|---|
| User Management | All | Read |
| Location Management | All | Read |
| Hardware Management | All | Read |
| Access Control Management | All | Read |
| Control Center Management | Door - Quick Grant | Full |
| Key Management | All | Read |
| Webhook Management | All | Full |
| Integration Management | All | Read |
Removing an App Integration
To remove an existing integration, navigate to the integration's configuration details view under Organization > Configure > Integrations. Select the desired integration. Once on this page (see below for example), click the Remove button in the top right, which will then prompt you for a secondary confirmation.
This action cannot be undone and will require completing the full set up and configuration of the integration if you wish to use it again.
API Key Management Best Practices
An API key is not a unique 1:1 application mapping, and it can be used by anyone who has access to it to perform the same actions granted to Meraki. It is important that you do not share or store any API key in clear text, in easily accessible places, or via email/SMS, etc. Similar to securely managing and sharing website logins, cloud-based password managers are an excellent solution for securely sharing API keys.
Find and Play Back Video for Access Control Events
With access control event information now available in Vision Portal, you have additional visibility into what is happening inside of your secured spaces.
Navigating Access Events on the Timeline
The camera timeline provides users with the ability to:
- Play/pause video
- Move forward/backward by frame or 10 second interval
- Adjust video playback speed (when viewing historical footage)
- Adjust the time resolution to see a window of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, 12 hours, 1 day, 3 days, or 1 week
- Adjust the visibile time period forward/backward according to the current time resolution
- Go to live to return from historical footage to the live view from the camera
- Download a screenshot
- Switch to larger viewing modes Theater or Fullscreen for improved focus
On the timeline itself, orange bars appear that denote the periods where motion was detected. Hovering over these orange bars will display the motion recap image for the appropriate time period.
In addition to the video navigation controls and motion detection information available on the timeline, access control events are now displayed. When viewing a single camera view within the Meraki Vision Portal, access control events appear as blue circles on the timeline, below any orange bars for motion events.
Hover over these access control events on the timeline to see a quick view of the access control event information.
Access control event information may vary based upon the integration partner and event type.
Clicking on the timeline access control event will open the Event Details drawer view, where a more complete list of information relating to the access control event can be viewed.
Viewing Access Events in the Activity Log
In addition to seeing access control events displayed in the timeline, all visible access control events can be reviewed in a list under the Access Control > Activity Log drawer view. Users can click into events to review more information about them. Quick links for key resources (Users, Doors, Controllers) back into the access control partner's integration application are provided so you can quickly review and manage them when needed.
Access control event information may vary based upon the integration partner and event type.
Unlock Doors Remotely
In case of an event where someone requires assistance entering a door to a facility, you can remotely unlock the door by clicking the Allow access button. This could be for common events such as:
- An employee that forgot their badge
- Delivery person requiring entry to deliver mail and packages
- A maintenance worker arriving for a service call at a remote building or substation
- A parent or guardian picking up their child after hours
By having this button available inside your camera view, it is easy to review the live or historical footage and verify the person should have access before remotely unlocking the door for access into a secure location.
Managing Permissions to the Physical Access Control Features
Permissions for Physical Access Control features are managed during the Integration setup, as outlined in the App Permissions section earlier in this document.
To administer permissions to the Vision Portal interface, see the Managing permissions to the interface section in the Vision Portal: Introduction article.
Restrictions
As of July 2024, there are a few restrictions today when configuring your Meraki Organization(s) for integration with Physical Access Control partner solutions:
- Each Organization can only have one Physical Access Control partner integration configured
- Each Organization can only link to a Physical Access Control partner integration using a single API key
- Each Organization will establish a Webhook subscription with the Physical Access Control partner integration. Each vendor may have limits on the number of Webhook subscriptions allowed. See each vendor's documentation for the maximum number of Webhook subscriptions they support
- Genea Events Webhook [limit of 5 Webhook endpoints per Customer Instance]
Provide Feedback
Use the Feedback button on the top-right corner to send Meraki your thoughts on the interface.
Have Questions?
General FAQs can be found in the MV Smart Camera FAQ article.