Broadcast Systems Monitoring -- MTD Systems At NAB 2010

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) March 20, 2010 -- With centralization and "hubbing" of broadcast operations monitoring these systems has become more important than ever before. This includes not only monitoring the equipment itself but also the media: is the media where it needs to be to play out? Many broadcasters will be looking at systems monitoring this year at NAB, it can improve your ROI by getting you timely information about the state of your equipment.

To be effective, monitoring must watch every part of every device in the system without limiting the means of collecting data. This means using a variety of protocols and methods such as WMI, SNMP, SSH, and even Telnet; it means using serial or parallel ports; it means WMI and API's; it means collecting and analyzing equipment logs as they accumulate.

The four biggest mistakes made in monitoring broadcast equipment systems are:

1. They Gather data by SNMP and WMI only when the richest data sets on this equipment in in logs. Some devices only have a serial port or a telnet connection yet most monitoring systems would pass by the data available there.

2. Failure to follow the media. On media based systems sometimes you can only see error conditions by noting that the media isn't where it should be. The power of following the media in a system is huge when it comes to detecting problems. Your operators might notice missing material minutes before, but a network monitoring system can tell you much sooner.
3. Inability to track media through an enterprise. Media prepared in one facility must move properly with it's metadata to another. If media is passed by satellite or WAN, you need to know how it is doing, are the connections good.

4. Slow aggregation of the data. On sites with thousands of endpoints data collection may take an hour or more. Meantime events have passed without status being known. If you have to wait an hour to know the state of your connections, chances are at least some of these states have changed since the data was collected. Perhaps a rain storm has caused signal fade on one of the sites scanned first and now it is not getting good signal.

It is vital to gather data by any available means, that you track media even through an enterprise with a massively parallel collection system so that data from thousands of sites can be collected in minutes. The four mistakes in monitoring these systems is usually caused by monitoring with generic network monitoring systems.

Broadcast equipment and video equipment needs monitoring that has been designed for it. If you handle media on your network then you can track it based on your work flow. That media is in the right place to play out, or correctly in storage are two important metrics to judge the health of your system.

It is also important that you have meaningful visualizations of your system. With one glance you should be able to determine overall status, then by drilling in see specific problems without a lot of hassle.

Effective network monitoring systems must watch all of the equipment, all the processes, all of the time. There are warnings you can learn about: on-air failures don't always have to happen.

MTD Systems network monitoring is designed by broadcast engineers, who have been in the trenches at the stations. I invite you to visit http://www.MTDSystems.com and learn more.

MTD Systems
425 Allegan Cir
San Jose, CA 95123
408-629-9084

More information can be found online at http://www.MTDSystems.com

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