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Event shows category 'other'

Event shows category ‘other’

Symptom

An event in your Events feed has event_category: other. You expected something specific — motion, intrusion, line crossing, tamper — but the system labelled it ‘other’ instead.

Likely causes

NovaVMS subscribes to every ONVIF topic the camera advertises, then classifies each event into one of ten stable categories. The classifier knows the common topics across major vendors (Hikvision, Dahua, Tapo, Vivotek, Axis, Bosch). When a topic isn’t in that list yet, it lands in other. The gateway stores a namespace-stripped Normalized topic in trigger_topic and preserves the camera’s verbatim value separately in raw_topic, so nothing is dropped. See Universal ONVIF event taxonomy for the full design.

Two common reasons a topic ends up in other:

  1. Genuinely-novel ONVIF topic. A new vendor, new firmware feature, or a camera that ships a proprietary detector outside the common ONVIF Profile T topic tree.
  2. Vendor-quirk topic that should map to a known category but doesn’t yet. For example, a normalized topic like RuleEngine/CustomDetector/SomeNewDetector that semantically means line-crossing but uses a vendor-specific name we haven’t added to the classifier.

Fix

If you are an operator or admin authoring alert rules

The event isn’t lost — you can author an alert rule that matches the displayed Normalized topic directly:

  1. Open Alerts → Rules, click New (legacy), and confirm the browser is at /alerts/rules/new. This is the current editor that exposes trigger_topic_pattern directly.
  2. Pick rule_kind: camera_event.
  3. Leave event_category blank (so it matches any category, including other).
  4. Set trigger_topic_pattern to a SQL LIKE pattern that matches the topic. Examples:
    • %CustomDetector% — match any topic containing that substring.
    • RuleEngine/SomeNewDetector% — match a specific prefix.
    • %/Crossed — match any topic ending in /Crossed.
  5. Keep Schedule set to Always. Legacy Business hours rules are stored but skipped by the live evaluator.
  6. Pick the camera or site scope, the recipients, and the cooldown. Save.

See Alert rule schema for the full pattern syntax.

If you are a developer or Novalien staff

Add the topic to the classifier so every future event of this type lands in the correct category:

  1. Open gateway/internal/onvif/event_state.go.
  2. Add one entry to the topicRegistry slice mapping the normalized topic string to the right event_category.
  3. Redeploy the affected gateways.

The category will then apply to new events. Old other rows in the database stay as other — there is no automatic backfill.

Verify

  1. Trigger the camera event again. Wait at least 30 seconds (the default per-topic clip cooldown).
  2. Open the Events page and find the new event.
  3. If you authored an alert rule, confirm the configured notification fired.
  4. If you updated the classifier, confirm the new event’s event_category is the value you mapped to (not other). If it still shows other, restart the affected gateway agent so the new code is in effect.

If none of this worked

  • Check that trigger_topic_pattern matches the event’s displayed Normalized topic, not the namespace-prefixed raw_topic in Raw ONVIF payload.
  • Confirm the camera scope on the alert rule includes the camera firing the event.
  • Confirm enabled: true on the rule and that the cooldown isn’t suppressing notifications.

See also