The purpose of this website is to keep you up to date on MTD Systems and to help bring together resources to help you effectively manage and monitor your network based system.
MTD Systems - Network Monitoring With Media Enhancements
November 13th, 2008 · No Comments · Network Monitoring and Management
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Increase Your Research Productivity With Google Notebook
November 13th, 2008 · No Comments · productivity
Have you discovered Google notebook yet? It’s a tool that will help make you more productive.
When I do web research for MTD Systems I typically favorite lots of things and cut and paste information into documents and save them into folders. At the end of it all I have something that will help me that day and that I want to keep - so it sits there on my computer. Over a short period of time my browser favorites fills up - even if I use folders and I have lots of documents around on my computer that, despite my best efforts, have names that make no sense to me unless I open them.
With Google Notebook I still search and find the data I want, then mark the section I’m interested in and right click. Google notebook has added an entry for itself to the context menu. You can see the marked area I want to save and the notebook menu item selected below:
When I press enter the selected area goes into a Google notepad entry, weblink, picture, text and all. Now I can save it in a particular ‘Notebook’ along with other information I grab along the way.
When I’m done I have information organized in folders - that I can use a full Google search with keywords and phrases on that allows me to find what I have put away. Not only that but since it’s on the internet I can go between office/home/friends house or wherever and always be able to hook up with the information again.
It’s made a great difference to me. Not all of those bookmarks that I can’t recall making, notes from the site as well as anything I care to add, and I can get to it from anywhere.
Go to www.google.com/notebook and you can get it set up. If you don’t have a gmail account you’ll need to set that up first, but it’s all free and a simple but great resource.
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It’s All In How You Look At Your Network
October 12th, 2008 · No Comments · Digital Broadcast, Digital Cinema, Network Monitoring, Network Monitoring and Management
MTD Systems has been doing this Network Monitoring thing for awhile now and we have developed many ways for our clients to look at devices, systems, and their enterprise. It’s been called The Human Interface: How can your technical people and operators best get their mind around what is happening anywhere in the enterprise? Here are some examples of looking at an enterprise and how it might look to drill into a device (this example is taken from an 1100 node system located all across the US).
US Map view that has several parameters displayed on a per-state basis. The hover will provide details of the issues of all sites with in the state.
If one of the states is drilled into, then you get this display that shows where the issues are by icon color.
Here is another representation of the sites - buttons in a tabular view change color to depict status.
If a device at the site is selected, then this is displayed.
Finally the Google Earth View that lets you fly around the world, zoom in and zoom out, to visit any facility in your enterprise. Of course you can drill into it as above.
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SNMP - A Network Monitoring Building Block
October 12th, 2008 · No Comments · Network Monitoring and Management, Uncategorized
MTD Systems uses a variety of techniques and protocols to capture the state of a complex video or broadcast system. In todays broadcast, Cinema, or editing facilities perhaps 10 to 20% of the information needed to fully monitor these systems is available by SNMP this is an important component. Often if someone is new to learning SNMP they are put off by oids, mibs, ASN, and a variety of TLA’s and terms that don’t get to the point of what SNMP is — just three things. Sounds like Curly in the movie ‘City Slickers.’ For Curley it was just ‘one thing‘ and it’s what you have to figure out. In our expert artical Asif Khan R explains the very basics of the protocol and there are three things that you won’t have to figure out - he tells you about them.
SNMP Made Simple
By Asif Khan R
At some point or other, if you are working with networks, you would have heard this term. The full form of this is much simpler and gives more confidence to use than the abbreviation. It stands for Simple Network Management Protocol. As the full form suggests, it is really simple. You need some sort of rules that can be understand between what you manage and yourself. This is the protocol part. And what you end up finally doing with it is Managing the Network. To begin with, it starts with managing a simple element or agent and then you decide to add more and more agents. Now you have a network of agents and you want to monitor and manage then using some application and this application would be termed as the manager. This is done in a simple way and hence it is called Simple Network Management Protocol. Of course it is simple if you only want to use it. If you want to develop SNMP itself, then this is not the article for you.
First, let us decide on what to manage. Let us say a router or a switch or a computer for example, we need to have some software or something inside that will speak our language and will do what it is asked to do. If he starts understanding complex language, then it become difficult. So we teach the agent only 3 commands. And we have the manager who will issue some of these commands and also understand something the agent sends. This is the protocol we agree between the agent and the manager. It is termed SNMP and it is as simple as what we have just read.
Now, what are all the things you would like to do on a router? Let us try to classify them. You would like to get the status of the router, get some important parameters on the router and get the current activities on the router. A verb which is common in all of theses tasks which we are planning to do is the word “get”. This is the first classification. So SNMP supports a command called the “GET” request. Now once you decide that you have to do a get, of course you will also know before hand what is that you want to get. Do you want to get the status, the parameter or the activities? These terms and the tasks would be different for each and every device. So how do we solve this problem? We could use a string and say that we want to get this string. Or we could do it based on some identifier and identify each of the element which we are interested in uniquely. This is what SNMP does and this is what is in broad terms meant by OID. So if you want to get the parameters of the router, you first need to know the address of the router. This is a IP address and then you also need to know what parameter you need on the router. Since we need to identify this parameter, we need to look up at something called the MIB and identify what is the OID of the parameter which we require to get it from the router. And we make our SNMP request of “GET” and the agent which is sitting on the router understands our language or protocol and replies back with the details as requested by the request.
Now we have got some parameters from the router agent. We find that something is not as expected and we need to modify something more or ask the router to do some additional task or may be ask the router to download a new software that we know is available and bug free and which the router vendor has mentioned that we need to apply. Here in this case, we need to trigger some change operations. This is provided by a “SET” request in SNMP. As before as we have done with the “GET”, we need to identify which router we are interested in and which parameter we are interested in and we then identify the OID from the MIB and send it. The agent now again understands our protocol and will set the parameters which we have provided.
One question that would be on your mind now, is how does just setting the variable help in making changes to the router. Sometimes the parameter is as simple as increasing for example the capacity of the router and sometimes it is much more than that. I would explain to you with an example of my first project which was software download. Assume that you have got a new software that you want the router to install. Of course the router is not like a windows machine, where you have a colourful big monitor and you do a series of clicks and everything is installed. Most probably what would need to be done would be the following. Place the software on some FTP server. Give the location of the FTP server and the user name and the password and the location of the file to someone and ask him to pick it up and give it to the router. This someone is our agent in the router. So what we do in this case is the following, we set some variables in the router that corresponds to the FTP server address, set one more variable that corresponds to the user name and again set one more variable to indicate the password of the FTP server and finally also set the variable to tell him where the new software is located. All “SET” operations are done by the SNMP manager to the agent on the router. Finally we ask the agent to initiate the software installation. This is again done using a “SET” operation on a particular control MIB variable for software download. Once this MIB variable is set on the agent, the software on the agent is now clever enough to know that it has to look at a series of MIB variables on the agent to identify the software location, get it and then starts the download of the software and would also probably install it. This the second class of operations that SNMP supports, the “SET” operation. With this example we realize the power of the “SET” operations though it is just a simple “SET” operation with respect to SNMP.
Finally, we would like to get some notifications from the router if something seriously is wrong in the router and this is also supported by SNMP. The first 2 types of operation are initiated from the SNMP manager and the third type is initiated by the SNMP agent itself. The agent has to be configured as to whom he has to send notifications and once this is configured, whenever the agent thinks is right, would send a trap to the SNMP manager and the SNMP manager can decide to do something as simple or complicated as ignoring it or sending a SMS to the operator incharge of the router to indicate the severity of the issues and also escalate it to the operator’s manager and not the SNMP manager in this case :). This is the third classification from SNMP, that it supports “TRAP“.
Once you have understood the three operations supported by SNMP, you have understood more or less what SNMP is.
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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Asif_Khan_R |
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Why Network Monitoring? What’s My ROI
September 26th, 2008 · No Comments · Network Monitoring and Management
We found an interesting article that begins to broach the subject of ROI for network monitoring. In the case of video facilities, traditional SNMP and WMI based network monitoring software misses key devices. Other means must be used to get the information needed to determine health of and media flow in video servers, format conversion systems, automation, newsroom, play out systems, and transmitters. These extensions are a standard part of MTD Sentry which contains the most extensive set of manufacturer independent data collection and network monitoring tools available for video based systems.
MTD Systems Network Monitoring Overview
Network Monitoring Tools
By Eric Morris
Networks are very important and crucial constituents of modern s a day business environment. Failure of networks or its components results in failure of communication between customers and employees that may result in substantial loss of revenue and productivity. There are various elements of the network that may need adequate monitoring to keep them running. These components are WAN; E-mail servers, business applications, LAN infrastructure like switches, routers etc. Monitoring tools generally diagnose the problems and report the same in a timely manner. They also provide useful information of the performance of the devices that are being monitored.
Selection of network monitoring tools largely depends on the size of the networks. For small to mid range networks, there are quite a few freeware available that can be downloaded and used for network monitoring. For larger networks, the monitoring tools generally have features for monitoring servers, networks, applications and systems. Some of the high-ended tools even have facilities for asset management and a helpdesk. A full feature tool diagnoses a problem in the network, reports the problem to the administrator through e-mail and generates an incident in the helpdesk tools.
Monitoring tools provide graphical representations and statistical data of the traffic load on the networks within any specified time periods, when it detects abnormal conditions on the network; it can send e-mail alerts and text messages to the administrator and support staff.
Key selection criteria for any tools are scalability, cost, ease of use and maintainability. It is advisable to conduct a detailed analysis alert and reporting requirements from the monitoring tool before deciding on the tool to buy. Generally the cost of monitoring tool is based on the number of devices to be monitored however most of tools can be upgraded to monitor larger number of devices as the network grows.
Network monitoring tools assists in reducing conditions of outages of the key and business critical elements of network and greatly helps in smooth functioning of internal and external business communications and transactions [http://www.i-NetworkMonitoring.com]Network Monitoring provides detailed information on Network Monitoring, Network Monitoring Software, Network Monitoring Tools, Network Performance Monitoring and more. Network Monitoring is affiliated with [http://www.e-NetworkMonitors.com]Network Bandwidth Monitors.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Eric_Morris http://EzineArticles.com/?Network-Monitoring-Tools&id=277380
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MTD Systems - Different From Traditional Network Monitoring
September 23rd, 2008 · No Comments · Network Monitoring and Management, Uncategorized
Advanced Network Monitoring For:
Monitoring A Large Avid System
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MTD Systems is a network monitoring software company focused around all aspects of IT based systems including excellent support for video applications whether Broadcast, News, Digital Cinema, Digital Signage, Satellite distribution or any of the countless other ways video is used. We watch your system from capture all the way through to the transmitter. As such our product has more facets than any traditional network monitoring solution on the market.
MTD Systems offers the most complete network monitoring tools for today’s multi vendor environment. Media, data, and control pass between many different products from many different vendors. The MTD Systems solution integrates this complex interplay into a single, unified, network monitoring system.
Our philosophy is to watch all of it, integrate the information and make it as meaningful as possible, look for the warnings and tell you about them. As you’ll hear us say, “on-air failures don’t always have to happen, there are warnings first. Tell us what keeps you up at night and we’ll help you design a network monitoring solution.”
The Next Level Of Reliability
MTD Sentry goes to each element on your network, checks media content, potentially thousands of lines of log files, connectivity, processor use, memory use, and general system health every few minutes. Data is displayed in an intuitive, functional view of the system with smart logging and smart alerts. Data from each part is evaluated in relation to the whole giving early warning of conditions that cause on-air disruption or loss allowing problems to be avoided — it is network management at it’s finest.
Overall system reliability improves giving both an immediate and long term payback.
Real Network Management From Anywhere
Know how your system is doing from anywhere in the world! MTD Systems network monitoring uses HTML web pages to present information. All system views, trend data, log files, etc are available all the time anywhere you can get web access.
Collection By Any Means
Don’t mess around, network monitoring that uses SNMP only. It captures only a little of most system data — you really won’t know what your whole system is doing. MTD Sentry has a complete set of interfaces to gather SNMP, traps, WMI OS log, Event logs, application logs, Syslogs, Telnet, SSH, HTML, RS232, RS422, RS485, GPI, VDCP, MOS, Sony VTR - ISR, Odetics, Profile, and many other sources of data. OS support for Linux, Windows, Solaris, HPUX, MAC…you name it. These data elements are combined into a homogeneous Monitoring, Alerting, and Problem tracking system.
Site Map
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Monitoring Technology Development Systems
Advanced Network Monitoring/Network Management
Copyright 2004-2008 — MTD Systems LLC
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MTDSystems Demonstration Of Monitoring Large Avid And GVG Systems
September 2nd, 2008 · No Comments · Uncategorized
MTD Systems demonstrates monitoring of a large Avid editing system.
Monitoring Large Avid System on Vimeo.
Here is a demonstration of MTD Monitoring a large GVG Newsroom system. We call it our Network Monitoring Overview.
MTD Systems Network Monitoring Overview on Vimeo.
At MTD Systems, what we do is watch all of the equipment - all the processe - all the time. There are warnings that we tell you about: on-air failures don’t always have to happen.
Tell us the things that keep you up at night and we’ll help you design a solution.
For more information visit: www.mtdsystems.com
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INews GVG Tools
August 30th, 2008 · No Comments · Uncategorized
Tools To Simplify Broadcast News Editing
You know how you have to make a placeholder for the story on INews and then double enter the data into the news editor. Look at what a mess this is:
No more!!!! The MTD Tool simplifys the process and removes the possibility of error:
This is a software add-in for Gass Valley Group and Avid iNews newsroom systems. It greatly improves the ability to add a video clip ‘place holder’ to the iNews scripting system. Get MTD’s INews-GVG Toolset call Dave Tansek at MTDSystems: 408-629-9084.
This tool is made for GVG/INews systems but if you have anyone’s system where the interoperability is less than optimum MTD can help.
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DCinema Review
August 29th, 2008 · No Comments · Uncategorized
DCinema Review
- XDC partnership in IP-RACINE focus on EURONEWS - Digital Cinema was still an emerging market when IP-RACINE project started in 2004, less than 150 cinema screens in the world were digital (about 0.1% of the total) and about 100-150 films in total had ever been ‘finished’ through the …
- The come-back (again) of the third dimension in movies - After the early tests (1838),a golden era (1952-1955), a revival (1960-1979), and the beginnings of IMAX 3-D (1980-1984), it seems stereoscopic movies are in for a new-new-new revival! James Cameron is the leader of this movement that …
- Digital Technology at a Cinema Near You - Cinema of the future is coming to a theatre near you: The introduction of digital technologies makes the european film industry more creative and competive at every stage of production and distribution. Stereo cinema, big screen live …
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Network Monitoring Video Demonstraitions
August 23rd, 2008 · No Comments · Network Monitoring and Management, Uncategorized
Network Monitoring Overview
Network Monitoring Enterprize
Broadcast Transmitter Monitoring
Satellite Distribution Monitoring
Tagged: Network Monitoring, Digital Cinema, Satellite, Newsroom, mtdsystems.com
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