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Cisco StreamWatch is a monitoring, management, and accounting tool designed to listen to audio and video streams using the IETF standard RTP/RTCP protocol (RFC 1889/1890) over IP. Cisco's IP/TV is an example of a product that uses RTP and IP multicasting to distribute audio and video over TCP/IP networks. Other such tools include Microsoft's NetShow and the MBONE VIC/VAT tools.
This release note discusses the following topics:
StreamWatch allows you to select which streams (programs) are monitored and what information is logged about the receivers. This information includes user name, network address, client viewer application, quality of service (including jitter, packets received, and packets lost), type of reception (audio, video, or both), and e-mail address.
You may view the information on the screen, store it in an ASCII log file, or route it to an ODBC compliant database, such as Microsoft Access. The data can then be processed for accounting purposes (for example, charging back to individual groups); generating demographics for advertising purposes; monitoring quality levels for network capacity planning; monitoring the popularity of certain programming or training classes.
You can enter program listings from Cisco's IP/TV Content Manager, via the MBONE SDR protocol, or from a local file.
You must have the following system requirements to run StreamWatch:
StreamWatch displays information in two primary windows: a program view and a user view. The program view contains the program listings StreamWatch has detected from the configured program sources. The user view contains the users that StreamWatch has detected for the program selected in the program view.
By default, StreamWatch attempts to contact iptvhost to obtain program listings. If you want to use different sources, you need to configure the program listing sources. To do this select the Configure menu, and the Program Listings item. A dialog box appears where you can select which type of program sources you want to use (Cisco Content Manager, MBONE SDR protocol, or local Cisco TVG file), and the information necessary to locate the source. For example, network address or file name.
Note that if you select the MBONE SDR protocol as a program source, the program listings will not appear all at once. Instead, they will slowly accumulate as the SDR messages are received by StreamWatch.
Once the program listings are configured, you can select a program for monitoring by simply clicking on the name of the program in the program view window. A list of users of the program should then begin to appear in the user view window.
By default, StreamWatch displays the user name, network address, audio and video quality of service, and the viewer application for each user of the program. To customize this information, go to Configure -> User Information.
StreamWatch displays two icons next to the name of a user. The first icon is an indicator of the quality of service the user is receiving. The icons can be green, yellow, red, or gray. Green indicates good reception, yellow impaired reception, red poor reception, and gray no information available.
The second icon indicates the media that the user is receiving. The icon indicates that either audio, video, or both audio and video are being received.
By default, StreamWatch updates the user view every 20 seconds. To configure the update interval, go to Configure -> User Information.
By default, StreamWatch uses verbose language to display the user information. To display an abbreviated form, go to Configure -> User Information -> Use Abbreviations.
StreamWatch itself always tunes-in to the program that is selected, and it appears in the list of users. If 30-60 seconds after a program is selected StreamWatch's quality of service icon is still gray, then it is likely that the program is not active. There still may be many users tuned in but there is no signal being transmitted for the program.
A program can have one of three states: Do Not Monitor, Monitor, Monitor and Log. The default state for a program is Do Not Monitor. This means that when the program is not selected in the program view, no information about the users of that program is maintained.
If you want to maintain information about a program's users, regardless of which program you select in the program view, set the program state to Monitor. Note StreamWatch can simultaneously monitor multiple programs. To set the this state, select the program, then go to Program -> Status. Select the Monitor option from the menu that appears. A binocular icon will appear next to the program name to indicate that it is being monitored. StreamWatch will continue monitoring the program until instructed to do otherwise.
If you want to log the information collected about a program, you need to configure a logging destination. Go to Configure -> Logging destination. A dialog box appears where you can choose to log to either an ASCII text file or an ODBC database such as Microsoft Access. The ASCII text format uses the comma separated field format that is compatible with import into a variety of spreadsheets such as Microsoft Excel.
Once you have selected a logging destination for StreamWatch, select the program you want to log, and then go to Program -> Status. Select the Monitor and Log option.
A notebook icon appears next to the program name to indicate that it is being logged. If you select a program for logging and no logging destination has been defined, StreamWatch displays a gray, closed notebook icon.
To obtain the most information possible about a program it is best to start StreamWatch logging the program before the scheduled start time of the program.
StreamWatch allows great flexibility in the information that is logged about a program. To select what information is logged about programs, go to Configure -> Logging filter and select from the following choices:
To display detailed information about a particular program or user, use the mouse to either double-click or right click on the name. A tabbed dialog box will appear with the information.
StreamWatch can replay a log file for a given program. This can be useful for demonstrations or reviewing events via the StreamWatch user interface. To use the replay function, do the following:
Step 2 Go to Configure -> Logging destination and select the Don't Log option.
Step 3 To make sure you have selected the program you wish to replay in the program view window, go to Program -> Replay, and open the ASCII text file log that contains the replay information.
StreamWatch informs you that it is starting replay mode, and to press the Escape key to stop replaying.
The user view then reflects the events recorded in the log file. Once the replay has been stopped, StreamWatch returns to its normal mode of monitoring real-time events for the program.
We have seen the following problems with older versions of Microsoft's WinSock system component:
 | Caution When StreamWatch is collecting data on a program, it joins the IP multicast group for that program. This means that all the multimedia data (audio/video) associated with the program is received by the computer. Although this multimedia data is not rendered, receiving it still consumes resources on the receiving computer. |
The number of programs that StreamWatch can monitor simultaneously is dependent on the computer on which it runs, and the bandwidth of the network segment to which it is attached.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend that you limit the number of simultaneous programs monitored to five to avoid encountering performance problems. By default, StreamWatch warns you when this limit is reached.
StreamWatch does not attempt to automatically detect which programs are active. Currently, there is no mechanism to detect if a program is active without actually tuning into the program. With a large number of programs this becomes impractical as both the monitoring computer and the local network would quickly become overwhelmed.
If you tune into a program and you see a number of viewers, but no quality of service information displayed what is most likely occurring is that the viewers are connected to the IP multicast group, but are idle because there is no one sending data. This is equivalent to tuning into a dead TV channel.
The definition of the Real-Time Control Protocol (RTCP) that StreamWatch uses to collect information on the receivers has several characteristics that are worth noting. All the receivers of a program share a fixed bandwidth allocated to sending their receiver reports. This means that as the numbers frequently. Also, a single receiver report does not contain all the information possible. So it may take several reports before all the receiver information is collected.
The type of encoding (compression) of a RTP stream can only be determined if data is being transmitted. This is due to the fact that a stream is typically defined to be capable of carrying several different encodings of a given media.
If you are running Windows 95, you may experience system instabilities if you run StreamWatch for many hours. This occurs more frequently on slower systems or those with less RAM. This problem can be fixed by downloading a Windows 95 update from Microsoft. The update is available at http://www.microsoft.com. Look for the download titled Window 95 Kernel 32 Update.
There is a known bug where creating an ODBC database from scratch in StreamWatch can cause ODBC to hang. Please use the ODBC Administrator program found in the Windows Control Panel to create an empty database for StreamWatch logging.
The StreamWatch distribution includes the ODBC 2.5 files necessary to run StreamWatch. A newer version of ODBC, 3.0, was recently released by Microsoft. Currently, we know of no issues with using this newer software. If wish to upgrade to ODBC 3.0 you need to obtain the necessary software from Microsoft. As of March 1997, the ODBC 3.0 SDK was available from Microsoft's ODBC web site, http://www.microsoft.com/odbc. Please be aware that the ODBC 3.0 SDK only contains ODBC drivers for Microsoft's SQL server. To obtain the latest Microsoft ODBC drivers for other databases, such as Access and FoxPro, you will need to obtain the ODBC drivers package. As of March 1997, the driver package was available at http://www.microsoft.com. The download size of this package is approximately 4 MB.
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Posted: Thu Apr 19 15:53:03 PDT 2001
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