Today’s Satellite Systems

Many satellite system projects these days involve satellite uplinks with hundreds or perhaps thousands of receivers in the network receiving content from them. Traditionally, if these networks are monitored, the planners rely on SNMP traps for big troubles and plan for round-robin polling and pinging to determine the health of the receivers and other devices.  The applications include digital cinema distribution, teleconference, distance learning, TV broadcast content distribution, digital signage, and the list goes on.

Traditional monitoring systems, because of polling speed, within an hour or two NOC personnel can know whether a device has failed or not and whether the receiver was up, on the right channel with adequate signal level, and locked for the transmission. As to the traps, a little secret: many of the devices do not support traps and if they do traps can be lost because they are sent as UDP traffic with no assured delivery. Requirements for today’s professional satellite systems have evolved to the point where NOC personnel need more information and they need it more quickly. Representative are teleconference, distance learning, and media distribution systems.

For these new systems the requirements for monitoring have moved out of a strictly maintenance need to both a maintenance and operational requirement.

• Teleconference and distance learning have an almost interactive need for status and data:
  1. Is the receiver is on the right channel?
  2. Is the feed good? Are error rates low and the signal level high?
  3. If the signal is low in Milwaukee, what’s the weather like?
  4. Are all of the correct materials downloaded to the receiver?
  5. Are keypads and other data entry devices ready?

• Media distribution systems for broadcast and digital cinema have many of the same needs and some others:
  1. Is there sufficient space on the device to receive the huge files used in these operations?
  2. What is the progress of the transfer (it takes a long time to transfer multi-gigabyte files)?
  3. Did the digital rights management (DRM) keys arrive?
  4. If it is a playout device, did the correct play list arrive?
  5. Can we get the playback logs as events play?
  6. What about maintenance logs, do we have to SSH into each device and retrieve them manually, or will the system automatically gather and check them for us?

These lists are representative of information the NOC needs to ensure proper operation of the network. First and second generation monitoring systems don’t even begin to broach gathering and reporting the new types of information needed to reliably operate these systems.

MTD Systems third-generation network monitoring software is massively parallel with media-aware enhancements that reflect industry needs and our companies TV broadcast roots. All of the data is collected, parsed, centralized, archived, and presented in a way that takes you quickly to points of issue. We not only have traditional tabular views, but maps with active Icons automatically generated from the addresses where the satellite receivers are located, and Google earth views (how cool is that?). You can fly around the world and know within seconds where any difficulty may lie. Drilling in takes you to a device page where data can be seen in detail, current status as well as historic data, site notes, trouble tickets, and the media extensions required. Wrapped around the whole network an aggregation process tracks your media to ensure it is where it needs to be.

MTD Systems satellite network monitoring is not your traditional network monitoring solution but a true third generation advance for satellite teleconference, satellite distance learning, and satellite program delivery systems.

For More Information:

copyright 2008 MTDSystems LLC

Technorati Tags: Digital Cinema, distance learning, Network Monitoring, NOC, Satellite, satellite distance learning, Satellite Network Monitoring, satellite teleconference, teleconference

Technorati Tags: Network Management, Network Monitoring

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.

Technorati Tags: google notebook, notes, productivity, time management, work smarter

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.

Technorati Tags: human view of network, Network Management, Network Monitoring, view your enterprise, View your network

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.

Technorati Tags: Network Monitoring, SNMP, Traps

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

Technorati Tags: Network Management, Network Monitoring, ROI

Technorati Tags: Avid, gvg, Harris, inews, Network Monitoring Software

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

Technorati Tags: Avid, gvg, MTDSystems, Network Management, Network Monitoring, newsroom, Video Editing, Video Servers, www.mtdsystems.com

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.

Technorati Tags: broadcast news editing, gvg, inews, newsroom

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Technorati Tags: DCinema, Digital Cinema