UniFi Protect (beta)

Whether the cameras and their recorder are doing their job: cameras offline, cameras connected but not recording, NVR disks in failure, storage in use and recording switched off. Not to be confused with the UniFi Network monitor (access points, switches, gateway).

Beta

Written from the vendor’s API documentation and tested against realistic recorded-style responses, not yet against a live instance. Tell us what you see.

Network ports to open

From the DumbMonit server (or its relay agent) to the device:

Port	Protocol	Purpose
443	TCP	UniFi OS (HTTPS, default)

The failure worth watching: a camera that dropped off and nobody noticed. A cable, a PoE port or a firmware update, and a camera is gone from the NVR; the footage you wanted is the footage that was never recorded. A camera that is connected but not recording is the same loss, one level deeper.

What it watches

All metrics are prefixed dumbmonit_unifiprotect_.

Metric	What	Labels
version_info	value 1	version
cameras_total, cameras_offline, cameras_not_recording	adopted cameras; those not connected; those connected, set to record, but not recording
camera_online, camera_recording	1 per camera while connected, while recording (at most 32)	camera
storage_used_percent, storage_size_bytes	NVR storage in use and its capacity
disks_total, disks_unhealthy	NVR disks, and those reported unhealthy
recording_disabled	1 when recording is switched off on the NVR

The built-in rules that apply: Protect camera offline, Protect camera not recording, Protect NVR disk unhealthy, Protect recording disabled, plus Monitor unreachable.

Create a local view-only user for Protect

1. In UniFi OS, open Admins & Users → Create New and create a local user named as follows, with no cloud account.

   dumbmonit

2. Give it access to the Protect application only, with the View Only role, and none to Network or other applications.

3. In DumbMonit, enter the console’s address and that user name and password.

Warning

Use a local account: UniFi OS refuses Ubiquiti cloud accounts here. The console’s certificate is usually self-signed: turn on the certificate option.

Credentials

Credential	Fields
User name / password	A local UniFi OS user. DumbMonit logs in on /api/auth/login, keeps the session cookie between probes and logs in again when it expires.

Address: the console’s host name (unvr.lan) or host:port. Storage in use stays high on purpose: Protect overwrites its oldest footage, so no rule fires on a full disk. Options: protocol (HTTPS by default), port (443), certificate check and request timeout (15 s).