AXIS Site Designer: keeping the plan true after install

AXIS Site Designer is Axis Communications’ free, browser-based tool for designing a camera system before it is bought: you place cameras on a floor plan, check coverage and pixel density, estimate storage and bandwidth, and export a bill of materials and an installation report. It is good at that job. What it is not built to do is follow the system after install, and on a site with 100 to 500 Axis cameras the design and the building start to part ways in the first month.

This post covers what Site Designer does, what carries over into AXIS Camera Station Pro, where the plan drifts from the site, and how to keep the design useful for the life of the system.

What AXIS Site Designer does

The current tool lives at sitedesigner.axis.com. It replaced the older AXIS Site Designer and AXIS Design Tool, and launched under the name AXIS Site Designer 2. Per the AXIS Site Designer manual:

• Maps. Upload a floor plan as PNG, JPG, or PDF (up to 10 MB), set its scale, place cameras, adjust their coverage, and add blockers. DORI pixel zones can be toggled on to show where each camera reaches each detail level.
• Camera selection. Filter cameras by a required pixel density, using the predefined DORI levels or a value of your own.
• Recording. Estimate power, bandwidth, and storage, with storage days per recording scenario (30 by default), and get recommendations for recorders, servers, switches, and licenses.
• Reports. Bill of materials, sales quote, power and bandwidth, installation report, system proposal, and total cost of ownership. Quote, bill of materials, and power and bandwidth export to Excel; the bill of materials also exports as JSON; reports print to PDF.
• Projects. Projects are kept in the browser’s local storage, and Axis recommends signing in to sync and save them online. A project can also be exported as a file.

That last point matters for an end user. A project that exists only in one person’s browser is lost when that browser’s data is cleared or that person leaves. Save the final project to an account the organization controls, and keep the exported file with the site records.

What carries into AXIS Camera Station Pro

Site Designer hands its design to AXIS Camera Station Pro. In Site Designer, Export project offers a code to use when the server is online, or a settings file to download when it is not. In AXIS Camera Station Pro, the import is under Configuration > Devices > Add devices, using the Site Designer configuration option, and devices are matched to the design by IP address or product name. Per the AXIS Camera Station Pro manual, what carries over includes schedules, maps, camera names and descriptions, recording profiles, Zipstream strength, audio settings, and retention time.

This is a real time saver at commissioning. It is also a snapshot: the design as it was on the day of import. Axis documents the handoff in one direction, from the project into the VMS.

Where the design and the site part ways

The install is where the drift starts. A camera shifts to clear a sprinkler pipe. A substitute model arrives because the specified one was back-ordered. The dock gets two extra cameras the week before opening. A dome is turned to look past new signage. By handover, the design and the building already differ in small ways nobody wrote down.

Then the site keeps changing for years. Cameras fail and are replaced with the current model. Racking goes up. A tenant remodels. Someone re-aims a camera to cover a new door. Each change is small and sensible, and none of them is entered into a design project that nobody has opened since commissioning. Five years in, the project describes a system that no longer exists, and the VMS holds the only current list of cameras, with no floor plan behind it that matches.

That gap shows up at the worst moments: an expansion bid sized against the old design, a storage upgrade that misses forty cameras, an auditor asking which cameras cover which entrances, an incident where nobody can say what the camera by the loading dock was supposed to see.

Keeping the Site Designer project useful

Site Designer does not have to be a one-time document. A few habits keep it worth opening:

1. Save the as-built, not the bid. After commissioning, update the project with the real positions, models, and aims, then export it and file it with the site records. This is the version every later change starts from.
2. Record the requirement, not only the camera. Note which areas need identify, recognize, observe, or detect. Cameras get replaced; the requirement for the main entrance does not change, and the next design is checked against it.
3. Plan every expansion in the as-built project. Adding cameras to the existing design keeps the storage and bandwidth estimates honest, because they include the cameras already there.
4. Re-run storage after any add. Site Designer’s storage estimate is a design figure. Ten cameras added without new disks shorten retention for every camera on that recorder.
5. Reconcile once a year. Compare the project’s camera list with the VMS device list. A camera in one and not the other is either undocumented or gone.
6. On a Hanwha estate, the same rules apply. Hanwha’s design tool is DesignPro, the successor to Wisenet Toolbox Plus, with map-based field-of-view simulation. It is a design-time tool in the same way.

The worked DORI distances and mounting rules behind a good design are in security camera placement for commercial sites.

A floor plan that stays current at 500 cameras

The habits above work, and they depend on someone doing them by hand, every time, for years. At a few hundred cameras across several sites, they slip.

The MentatNOC camera coverage map is the floor plan that keeps up on its own. Each pin is a camera the platform is already watching, with its live health on the pin and a view drawn from its model’s datasheet optics, Axis, Bosch, or Hanwha. Planned cameras sit on the same plan with hatched views, and when they are installed they are promoted to the real devices, keeping their position and aim, so the design becomes the as-built without a redraw. A camera that goes offline goes dark on the drawing. A camera knocked off its aim raises a tamper alert. A camera in the fleet that is not on the plan sits in the list of cameras not yet placed until someone puts it there. A revision saved at handover can be compared against the plan today to show what moved, turned, or disappeared. It monitors device health, not video.

Use Site Designer for what Axis built it for, the first design and the bid. Use a live map for the years after. Integrators who deliver a Site Designer project can add the finished site to their service contract under camera monitoring, with alerts landing in their own ticketing system under their own SLA. See one running against a 500-camera fleet on the interactive demo.