HikVision NVR on Meraki Network

[michaelpatton]

Hello all. Relatively new to the community, but it's been very helpful in the past with my networking questions. I'm also not sure if this is in the right section of the forums (if not, please advise how to move). I am a generalist IT Manager of a team of just me at my employer. We recently had a third party vendor (a large, regional security company) install a new security camera system for us using a HikVision NVR and HikVision cameras. I set up TCP and UDP port forwarding in our MX84 firewall to allow external access, which works. However, the video feeds are incredibly slow and frequently freeze altogether. Everything looks like it is set up properly, as far as I can tell. The port the NVR is plugged into on one of our MS210-48FPs reports gigabit auto negotiate. We've tried a new CAT 5 cable and a different NVR, and the performance issues remain. Does anyone have any experience with an issue like this, or tips for something to try to alleviate the performance issues from the network side? We've also got an MS250-48FP Layer 3 switch in between the Firewall and the Routers. If there is any other information about our network that would be helpful for this troubleshooting, please ask.

Thank you!

[alemabrahao]

Hi @michaelpatton,

The Global bandwidth limits are configured? The NVR and Cameras are communicating on the Local network or are you using the port forwarding to communicate cameras with the NVR? It's not clear to me.

[michaelpatton]

I'm not sure about any global bandwidth limits. Can you point me towards where I would find that in the dashboard?

The Cameras connect directly to the NVR, the port forwarding is to allow external access to the NVR via web portal or remote app.

[alemabrahao]

Sure, https://documentation.meraki.com/MX/Firewall_and_Traffic_Shaping/SD-WAN_and_Traffic_Shaping

[cmr]

@michaelpatton a few questions if you can:

1. If you view a camera locally how much bandwidth does this use? 
2. How much WAN bandwidth do you have? 
3. How much is generally in use?
4. If the remote user pings the NVR what is the latency? 
5. Is the remote user using a web browser or proprietary client software?

We can view our (non cloud) cameras remotely but we use either client VPN or Meraki SD-WAN to ensure a good and secure experience.

[BlakeRichardson]

What is the speed of the internet connection, its not likely to be a switch or router issue but a speed issue on the WAN side of things. Also the more cameras you try to view at once the increase in bandwidth.

If you are running high FPS with high resolution you are going to run into problems viewing externally. Many cameras support a second lower quality stream for this purpose however you are still streaming usually poor encoded video which is nowhere near as efficient as say Youtube. 

[alemabrahao]

I agree with you @BlakeRichardson