Gate Watching

What is gate watching?

The gate is usually the weakest point in an otherwise sound fence, and most of what goes wrong there is procedural rather than criminal. A gate left open after the last truck leaves. A contractor who props it for convenience at 6am. A vehicle idling outside for ten minutes at a time of night when nothing should be arriving. None of those trip an intrusion alarm, because nobody has climbed anything.

What a gate rule looks like

You write the rule in the words you would use to brief a new starter, and the AI is instructed with your wording. Typical rules on live sites read like this:

• Alert if the gate is open after 6pm on a weekday.
• Alert if a vehicle waits at the gate for more than two minutes.
• Alert if the gate is still open thirty minutes after the last vehicle leaves.
• Alert if a person is at the gate outside delivery hours.
• Alert if a truck enters the gate on a Sunday.

Rules that describe something visible in the frame work. Rules that depend on information the camera does not have do not: whether that particular ute is authorised, whether the driver has a permit, or what a number plate says against a list. If a rule cannot be answered from the image, we say so during scoping instead of accepting it and hoping.

How the rule is applied

Mechanically, Gate Watching is scoped as a custom detection objective on the camera that sees your gate. Scoping covers four things: which camera has the angle, how far the gate sits from it, what the lighting does at the hours the rule applies, and what routine activity should never trigger an alert. We tune against imagery from your own site and validate the rule before it goes live, because a gate rule that fires on every delivery is worse than no rule.

Once live, a confirmed match runs the same notification chain as every other Vael alert: an automated phone call, SMS and email to your nominated contacts, carrying the image that triggered it and a timestamp. The event is logged with its verdict, so a pattern of gates left open is something you can show someone rather than something you suspect.

What Gate Watching does not do

Worth being blunt, because the name invites the assumption. Gate Watching does not open, close or lock a gate. It does not connect to your access-control panel, intercom, boom gate controller or card reader. It does not check credentials, and it does not match number plates against a permit list. There is no control path from Vael to any hardware on your site.

The product is a set of eyes and a notification, and that is the whole of it. If you need a gate to physically respond to something, that is an access-control job for your installer, and Vael sits alongside it rather than inside it.

Where a gate rule earns its place

Gate discipline tends to matter most where an insurer or a head contractor has written it into the conditions: equipment and plant hire yards, depots taking after-hours deliveries, construction sites with a single controlled entry, and any yard where the fence is sound and the gate is the only real opening. In each case the value is not catching an intruder, it is knowing within minutes that the site has been left open, while somebody is still close enough to do something about it.

How it is priced

Gate Watching is an add-on product to any Security Monitoring plan, quoted per site. Scoping is what determines the price: the number of gates, the camera angles available and how much tuning your particular traffic pattern needs.

Full details are on the pricing page.