Runbook: Frigate Camera Down

Alert name: FrigateCameraDown

A Frigate camera has reported 0 FPS for 5+ minutes, meaning the camera feed is not being received.

Diagnostic Steps

1. Check Frigate UI — https://nvr.ops.eblu.me — look at the camera thumbnail and status
2. Check Frigate API stats:

   curl -s https://nvr.ops.eblu.me/api/stats | python3 -m json.tool

3. Check Frigate pod logs on ringtail:

   kubectl logs -n frigate -l app=frigate --context=k3s-ringtail --tail=30

4. Check the camera itself — verify it’s powered on and network-connected. Try accessing the RTSP stream directly.

Common Causes

• Camera offline — power outage, network issue, or camera crash
• NFS mount lost — Frigate storage on sifaka; if the NFS mount drops, recording stops and FPS may drop
• Frigate pod restart — during restart, camera FPS briefly drops to 0
• RTSP stream timeout — camera firmware issue; power cycle the camera

Related

• frigate — Frigate NVR reference
• deploy-infra-alerting — Alerting pipeline overview