The Live Monitoring tool on the Dashboard allows broadcasters to gain greater insight into their live stream performance and audience experience- the Live Monitoring console.
The Live Monitoring console gives you the ability to get a real time, easy to understand overview of your network and your stream while live. You can access the Live Monitoring console from under the metrics and monitoring tab in the left hand side of your dashboard.
Once on the monitoring page, you can choose the channel you want to monitor from the dropdown menu at the top of the page. Channels that are off air will be indicated as such; with some limited information on how the channel is set up being available. Channels that are live will give detailed information on channel performance.
Some of the information shown on this page:
- channel status: live or off air, plus the duration of the current broadcast
- auto recording status: on or off
- stream health: this is determined by the available upload bitrate to the IBM Video Streaming servers from your location
- buffering ratio: this is the total buffering ratio of both the broadcaster side and the viewer locations
- viewers: this shows the number of active viewers, viewer hours available on the account, top 3 domains in which your stream is being watched, and top 3 countries by viewership.
Below the vital statistics on your live broadcast is the embed viewer. The embed viewer shows the IBM Video Streaming player, and how your broadcast is looking in any of your embedded players.
Below the embed viewer is your stream setup information. This shows you some basic information about the configuration of your stream. The location of the broadcast, device type being used for encoding, and the location of the IBM Video Streaming servers are all listed in the first row. Below that is basic information about your video and audio streams- codec, resolution, aspect ratio, etc.
The channel setup tab shows a list of features that are enabled for the channel you are currently monitoring. You can tell at a glance about password status, embed restrictions, and other features and locks from this tab.
The bottom tab will show you performance metrics. In this tab, you can view how your broadcast is performing for your viewers across either ISPs or CDNs. You can see how many viewers on any given ISP are experiencing buffering during your broadcast in real time, or which ISPs or CDNs currently have the most viewers.
