By Michael Griffin
If you do broadcast engineering then you know how difficult it can be to keep tabs on racks and racks of television broadcast equipment. How do you keep track of hundreds of devices, many of them critical to revenue generation? Enter a network monitoring system…
Network Monitoring Systems Limitations
If you have tried to implement network monitor software for this equipment then you have faced many challenges. A network monitoring system for television broadcast equipment faces many hurdles. Most television broadcast equipment was not designed for easy monitoring. SNMP has been the battle cry in trade magazines but most broadcast equipment either doesn’t have SNMP capability or it is limited: all of the information you need to determine equipment health and for troubleshooting is not included.
We have not yet talked about media – the content that goes on the air. The flow of media from creation to air is the key metric in broadcast. It is important to track media if you really want to ensure the health of your broadcast system. Has the media arrived from the supplier and is it on the right server to play out?
Many IT people thrust into supporting broadcast operations have failed to realize the specialized nature of this equipment and the systems and assume that the same kind of monitoring system that keep tabs on office computer networks will do a good job here as well. There often gets to be a tension between broadcast engineers and IT personnel as limitations are seen when monitoring is added.
Diverse Equipment Makes Up Key Broadcast Systems
Consider a large video editing or newsroom system: there are lots of PCs and controllers gathered around central storage. Less than 20% of the equipment in these systems has any effective SNMP capability. To make matters worse the best troubleshooting information is usually held in equipment logs. These logs are often cryptic and manufactures have provided only a limited life for them. The logs can overwrite themselves, when there is trouble, in a matter of hours and sometimes even minutes. The data you need to provide the manufacturer to resolve the problem can be lost before you have an opportunity to collect it. These systems also incorporate many different operating systems sometimes with only terminal access making it more of a challenge to get data using a monitoring system.
Limitations Of Traditional Network Monitoring
The bottom line is SNMP will not do much for you in today’s television systems. Likewise with WMI, WMI can get you a lot of data about Windows systems but it is again only a piece of what you need. The fact is you must use all of it: SNMP, WMI, equipment logs, sometimes contact closures, temperature probes, voltage samples, and on and on. It gets to be kludge upon kludge to try to fit this into most monitoring systems and this doesn’t even get you to the point of considering the media.
After this data is collected something must be done with it. Traditional SNMP monitoring with WMI and some other extras added can send a variety of alerts and sometimes build maps but generally, because of the limited view given to the equipment, these network monitoring systems fail to give you a comprehensive picture of what is going on. What trouble is really lurking under the hood. You just can’t tell because of missing data and poor collation of the data that is collected.
These are some of the problems in broadcast engineering with network monitor software, some of the challenges that a network monitoring system should handle for you. Broadcast equipment is specialized and traditional monitoring systems just do not cut it. So much data is simply not collected and is ignored.
So how do you understand what your broadcast systems are doing? I invite you to learn more about network monitoring for television broadcast systems by visiting http://www.MTDSystems.com.
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