Network Monitoring - Broadcast Equipment Monitoring

By Michael Griffin

Many network systems today trasfer media.  More and more Terrestrial Television Stations are operating in hubs, where much of the work is done in a central location and the actual stations in the town are sometimes just a transmitter, or a transmitter with a newsroom.

IPTV is on the rise where customers get their TV from the internet.  Often these are hubs within a community with the content distributed out via satellite where it is put into the local streams. 

Digital Cinema is beginning to distribute via satellite.  Huge movie files are moved via satellite to each theatre and the distributer needs to know how the transfer is going, that the movie will be there when it needs to play out.  These systems may have thousands of end points to monitor.

Retail likewise is making extenisve use of satellite distribution with thousands of end points. Transferring digital signage data and teleconference it’s important to know the state of the network quickly.

Monitoring these big systems and having a fresh overview and a fresh status is an interesting process.  Much of the information is by SNMP and must be polled.  Many of the failure and status info datasets must be polled: to get lock status, EsNo, BER or many of the other parameters from a receiver you must poll.  The challenge is doing this for 2,000 receivers or more and getting this data within a couple of minutes.  On media based systems the files being handled are not available via SNMP and they must be gotten by other means and incorporated into the display and alerting system so operators know that the right media is where it needs to be.

MTD Systems does this everyday for customers in various parts of the world.  www.MTDSystems.com

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