January 20, 2015

Debugging WMSPanel push API for pay-per-view and alerts

WMSPanel is a platform for reporting, monitoring and control over media servers. Some of our features allow receiving data via push API for further processing which includes those common steps:

  1. Create a handler available for incoming HTTP POST requests.
  2. Set up handler URL within WMSPanel account setting at Control -> API setup menu.
  3. Your media servers start sending data to a handler.
The incoming data may differ as well as further activities. Currently the following features are using push API:


As a customer is setting up a handler, he may need some real life examples of the data which he is supposed to get.

WMSPanel now provides a test handler which you may use for sending requests from your servers. It also provides a web page for viewing the results so you could see what is being sent. Let's see what you need to do in order to use it.



1. Set up test handler


Go to Control -> API setup menu to see a page with API settings split by tabs. Clicking on Push API tab you will see pay-per-view and (un)publish events alerts API parameters. At the bottom you see a link to test handler which would look like this:
https://trest.wmspanel.com/f9f712d364a3d33cb401c
You need to add it to corresponding fields for handlers' URLs as shown on a screenshot below.


Setting up test PPV handler.
Same URL may be used for Notifications API tab which controls alerts about servers and streams' statuses.

Setting up test notifications alerts handler.

Now, when you applied handler, you use the same URL for tracking the data being sent.

2. View results


Open the URL in your favorite browser to see incoming data for the last 10 minutes.

Browsing the incoming requests.

Each request has its time, source server and raw data.


The described debugging capability allows implementing complex streaming infrastructures with less efforts so feel free to try it and let us know of any questions or issues.


Related documentation


WMSPanel, Nimble Streamer, Wowza reportingAPI referencePaywall 

4 comments:

  1. How can the token on the Push and Notification API sections be used in the associated handlers to ensure that the request to the handler is from a valid server?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Jacques,

      Please take a look at this article: http://blog.wmspanel.com/2014/10/server-offline-notification-api.html

      You can see it has server info in a sync.

      And you may use digest in order to make sure it's a sync from valid source:
      ---
      A digest is a signature which you may compare on your side by calculating it as "MD5(time + token)", where "time" is the time of receiving the message and "token" is the string which you see in API setup page. It can be used to check the credibility of incoming request.
      ---

      Delete
  2. Could we have some documentation on what "Report client IPs" and "Report User-Agents" does/means ?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi,
    it's simple.
    -client IPs are list of TCP ip addresses particular ID use during the session
    -User-Agents are HTTP User-Agent header list ID use during the session

    ReplyDelete

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