Hello folks!We have an issue with some multicast streams. For some reason picture is very unstable in evening, during internet usage peak times. We have had monitor our links and uplinks and there wasn't any oversubscribtion. I looking for usefull multicast stream monitoring tool now. Any suggestion?Thank you!
Hi,
Hello folks!We have an issue with some multicast streams. For some reason picture is very unstable in evening, during internet usage peak times. We have had monitor our links and uplinks and there wasn't any oversubscribtion. I looking for usefull multicast stream monitoring tool now. Any suggestion?Thank you!
one of my customers had issues with their iptv distribution and we consulted this guy.
Überwachung von Fernsehen - IPTV / Blog / Privat - Lutz Donnerhacke
The solution he has, subscribes iptv channels on monitoring boxes and uses all kinds of
heuristics to look into not just the packates but also the video inside the multicast streams.
It turned out that in the specific customers case packet reordering was the issue which was
easily eliminated.
Hacing monitoring in place is also great for finger pointing issues where you want to prove
that it's not your network but the tv station
screwing up the signal.
Greetings
Christian
EXFO.
It will cost some money, but is worth it.
Mark.
If it is not capacity saturation, it may have something be membership
stability. Not knowing anything about your IP multicast configuration,
it is impossible to say anything concretely with certainty
This is to say however, you may want to also be sure to monitor
membership, interface, port, PIM, ..., states.
All the way down to spanning tree recalculation, you may not notice it
with unicast, but anything that might prevent a stream from being
forwarded due to a join state disruption are sometimes the causes of
these types of events.
It is a bit old and may not be the latest copy, but here is a copy of
Bill Nickless' very handy troubleshooting methodology you should have
handy:
<https://nets.ucar.edu/nets/docs/procs/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-multicast.pdf>
Unfortunately there isn't much in that paper about Layer-2 related
issues as I alluded to above, but hopefully it gets you part of the
way there.
John
If you are in the Video content delivery business using mcast then these folks are one of the leaders. You can put multiple probes and make sure your mcast coming off source is solid, through the core router solid, and at the edge... http://www.ineoquest.com/ they are not cheap but worth every dollar
Hey,
Hello folks!We have an issue with some multicast streams. For some reason picture is very unstable in evening, during internet usage peak times. We have had monitor our links and uplinks and there wasn't any oversubscribtion. I looking for usefull multicast stream monitoring tool now. Any suggestion?Thank you!
How are you monitoring this for oversub? SNMP graphs for pps/bps are
not useful nor his looking at CLI pps/bps counters. You should monitor
if there are queue drops on egress. If possible also monitor queue
length, but not all platforms offer this information.
My friend Occam says you're probably dropping packets.
You could also subscribe to the stream with monitoring PC which runs
something like this GitHub - tarko/CCmon: CLI based MPEG-TS continuity counter monitor with socket/file/pcap inputs
Yes, it is may be effect of microburst in our network or in link between our ISP and TV carrier.Thank you.
When evaluating Ineoquest against EXFO a couple of years at ago at
previous employer, EXFO came out shining.
I'll give Ineoquest another chance next time I'm running an IPTV network
and see how far they've come since then.
Mark.
hey,
If you are in the Video content delivery business using mcast then
these folks are one of the leaders. You can put multiple probes
and make sure your mcast coming off source is solid, through the
core router solid, and at the edge... http://www.ineoquest.com/
they are not cheap but worth every dollar
I can recommend http://www.agama.tv/
We use it for general purpose monitoring but not so much for interactive debugging.
Shameless plug: for debugging I wrote GitHub - tarko/CCmon: CLI based MPEG-TS continuity counter monitor with socket/file/pcap inputs some years ago and it works great. Wanted to have alternative to all windows based software out there that will just report number of CC errors but will not support multiple streams (or copies of the software running), will not produce useful logs for correlation etc.