Reporting bandwidth and traffic

Greetings!

Media streaming statistics primarily show the data which is answering basic questions. How many users did I have during some period of time? Who are they? What did they get from company's servers?

First question is answered by showing various streams count reports. There are dozens of possible reports that may show any slice of data that might help understanding the numbers. WMSPanel provides basic time line charts that show real-time and retrospective data. Most of the needs are covered by those graphs.

The "who" question may be answered in a different ways but most important thing to be discovered are geographical location and user software description. Geographical location is covered by real-time geo-location report showing flags and names of the countries that currently are streaming all media. We plan to extend this type of info with retrospective geo data. Software description includes data like streaming software ("user agent"), operating system, system language etc. This data is not critical but it might be interesting, so we plan including these reports in the future.

The content reports show streams names and their statistics. Another important set of reports which is currently supported is a bandwidth and traffic usage.

Basically this kind of reports shows how much data was transferred to and from users to get the understanding of traffic consumption. Also some customers might need to know bandwidth used by applications and servers.

Let's start from bandwidth. Its graphics are combined with connections count chart - both real time and retrospective with the scale being located on the right from "Connections". Real-time chart shows current bandwidth happening during last couple of minutes in addition to streams count.

Server downtime notification

Being a streamer means that your assets are always online. And if something goes wrong and becomes invisible from outside, you'll need to know about that.

Recently we've re-designed and re-implemented a small but nice feature that might be interested for many of our customers. A customer may now set a list of emails which will get a special notification when a server goes down, like reboot or power outage or anything else.

The email notification is set after 20 minutes of not getting sync-ups from the server.

So once you register any server you may go to Control menu and check corresponding link:

Control top menu.

Once you enter the set up page, you can add or delete any number of emails. You can also send a test notification by pressing corresponding button. In this case all recipients will get the same alert as they would get after real downtime.

Offline notifications setup

Once anything happens to a server and it goes offline - you'll know about it within a few minutes after a small timeout via email alert. As soon as it gets back, you'll be notified.

You may also use downtime notifications push API to process the offline events in some other way in addition to just sending emails.

Contact us if you have any questions.

Related documentation

Downtime notifications push API, Notifying on RTMP stream (un)publish, Statistics import API, Pay-per-view for Wowza Media Server

Why we prefer service rental over purchase

Greetings!

Some of our potential clients ask if we provide stand-alone, or on-site, installations. This basically means that some businesses prefer buying software rather than renting it. So here in this post we'd like to explain why we chose service rental model when a customer subscribes to a service.

This model is commonly known as "SaaS", or "Software as a service".

First of all, the primary feature of WMSPanel was to make a centralized reporting solution. The most obvious approach here is to make web-based application that gathers data from various sources. Having such product, we still have 2 payment options - sell it as a single product or provide monthly subscription. We chose the second approach.

What are customer's benefits from business owner and system administrator points of view?

No server resources for installed application. Having yet another logs analyzer means that you need to have some server which will have all processing being done. WMSPanel makes processing by itself outside of your assets' network. So no need to get extra HW or OS licenses.

Less administrating. Customer only needs to set up data slices for respective sub-clients (via simple web-interface handled by WMSPanel servers) and spend several minutes to install WMSPanel server add-on (Wowza agent or Windows Media plugin). That's it, nothing else. We can even do it ourselves as part of our support activities.

Continuous feature delivery. All customers get new system release as soon as we deploy it online. No need for your admin to check for new releases, re-install software and check if it's compatible with current environment. Once a new functionality is online, it's available to every customer.

Testing is done within the same environment with customers. Before rolling out new release we test it using the same environment as used by every other customer. Thus, when it's done, we know for sure that it works for people outside of our "sandbox".

Optimization for client and server parts - we pay for resources used by WMSPanel so we want to cut expenses as much as we can. For us, improvement literally has its cost and profit. The more we optimize, the better performance is for customers. This allows keeping low prices and providing good deals and discounts. See some other thoughts on this in previously posted notes on clouds and virtuality.

You can stop any time. If you buy a license for several hundred dollars and then discover that it does not meet your needs, you still will use it just because you already paid for it. Monthly subscription may be cancelled at any moment so there's no risk of overpaying.

Having read all above, you can see why renting a service might be better for your business than just buying a license for a standalone application. You can enhance this list with pros and cons from your business perspective, feel free to comment.


You can have fully-functional trial of WMSPanel free of charge during 2 weeks to see if it works good enough for you. Just sign up and follow installation instructions. And contact us to ask any questions or get pricing options.

Please also have a look at Nimble Streamer, the light-weight HTTP streaming server for HLS, Smooth and progressive download. It may be controlled via WMSPanel GUI and it comes free of charge.

FastSpring is now our payment gateway

Greetings!

Being a SaaS solution, WMSPanel needs a secure and reliable way to collect monthly payments. We are glad to announce that we are now accepting payments via FastSpring, an all-in-one e-commerce, merchandising and fulfillment solution.

It's a reliable financial solution that suites best for selling software and providing agile subscription functionality to end-users. Customers' data is processed at FastSpring websites via SSL and its security is verified by VeriSign.

After you fill in subscription data, you're being charged on a monthly basis so won't need to re-enter your payment information each month. If you are from European Union, we'll pay VAT for you so total amount will be the same.

Clouds and virtuality for Wowza and WMSPanel

Virtual services and cloud computing become more popular during last few years. No surprise that some resource-consumption solutions and products has been recently exploring that opportunity.

As example, Wowza Media Services provides Amazon AWS installation for those who wants to create scalable streaming solutions. There are many other companies that provide similar functionality. This gives a low threshold for companies that want to try providing streaming services. For mature companies this also allows re-structure their assets and increase overall robustness. You can even make your own cloud using software like Parallels solutions to be independent from 3rd-party vendors.

WMSPanel also uses this technology, we chose Rackspace for both staging and production environment. And of course it works fine with Wowza Media Server on Amazon EC2.

Please also read more about our current cloud architecture.

The pros of cloud solution for us are simple.

1. Ready to use environment. No need to buy or rent a hardware when we need it. It's already there because virtual machines are always available.
2. Scalability is a big advantage. When a large customer starts some free evaluation (since first 2 weeks are free of charge) we may see some overload. In this case we can just switch to another service plan to keep our customers out of trouble and to have plenty of time to optimize things.
3. When a customers wants a separate branded instance of WMSPanel, we can setup a virtual machine that will handle his own requests without any intersection with other customers.

The only contra is that pricing plans are missing granularity, i.e. in case of increased consumption we have to buy more than we actually need. This means extra stability for our customers but a bit bigger price for us.

Given all pros and cons we can already say for sure that optimization has its cost, literally. When we optimize our software, we can see numbers that say how much we cut down our expenses and hence what service price may be optimal for our customers.

This also means that we may provide agile customers pricing. And cost becomes much lower as long as we keep implementing and improving WMSPanel.

WMSPanel cloud control is also used for controlling Nimble Streamer, a light-weight HTTP streaming server for HLS, Smooth and progressive download streaming and re-streaming.

Introducing user groups and multiple clients logins

Hi!

We've recently re-designed user groups concept a little bit. Please read new description of data slices concept.

Read more about WMSPanel streaming reporting.

Thanks!

Windows Media: adding publish points

Greetings!

Recently we've deployed a new WMSPanel feature for Windows Media Services. Some customers wanted to be able to add publish points via our web interface. WMSPanel is already able to control server behavior - starting and stopping servers. So now our customers are able to add publish points as well.

Currently both broadcasting and on-demand publish points are supported.

To add a publish point, a customer admin should go to a server page and click on "Add publish point". Then enter a name, a path to a source within a server and choose PP type. Click "Add publish point" button to perform the addition.

Adding a broadcasting publish point for WMS

Adding on-demand publish point for WMS

That's it. Once a publish point is added, it data will be available on graphs.

Read our blog for more information on current and upcoming features. Contact us for more information.

WMSPanel architecture from scalability, security and usability perspectives

When we initially started working on system architecture our main ideas were like described below. Note that the industry term "design" often refers to "architecture" and so will we.

• Make our system as secure as possible. Security is a very complex task in case when your servers are accessible from Internet. When we started to think about WMSPanel development we checked current solutions publicly available and found out that most of them were desktop applications. From technically point of view this means that desktop application requests information from media servers and presents to a user. So media server should seat and wait for user request and provide necessary information. Most solutions install RDMS on media servers to save and process statistic for the media server. Currently almost all analytic and control media solutions have been moved to the web. But almost all of them still have old design. Their control panels initiate connections to media servers and load logs and perform server related operations. This is a very pure POOL system architecture that forces your system administrator to add additional rules to open additional control ports on media server. In additional your web site cannot process media server data when it want to send it to you. Media Server should seat and wait when web site is ready to call it. In addition, a "pool" architecture has a very bad scalability. If you have 1000 servers you need to call all of them and you should have very clever scheduler to process servers in time. Our solution has a PUSH architecture. When Media Server is ready to push some new data to a panel, it just does that. If there's nothing to say - it can stop sending for some time. In addition, our clients' admins don't have to open additional control ports. We also use industry proven HTTPS protocol to send our data to a panel. We don't even have an option to use HTTP to do that. Both wmspanel.com and on-site client's installations MUST have a valid SSL certificate and the system doesn't have an option to suppress this. Your data will not be accidentally sent to a wrong server or cannot be cought and decrypted. Server registration procedure is very secure as well and use HTTPS to register server. Solution accept only valid certificate during registration. Panel web-site use the same certificate so when you want to work with your servers you are under the shield as well.

• Make installation process as simple as possible. We don't want our clients' admins to play with configs, to manually copy solution libraries etc. We tried to do all necessary things during the installation. We are proud that we spent a lot of time but made installation process as simple, clear and secure as it is.

• Support all versions of media servers we integrate with. Support them on all platforms where media servers works for all supported architectures. Currently we support Windows Media Server and Wowza Media Server. This means that if you have one or both you can use our solution regardless of their versions.

You can already tell that our architecture goals were achieved in current system implementation.

Please also examine our current cloud architecture.

Wowza geo-location stats are now available

This article is obsolete. Please refer to geo-location report for Wowza.

Wowza Media Server client types supported by WMSPanel

Currently we support all client types what Wowza Media Server supports.

HTTP types

• Flash HTTP Streaming known as HTTP SAN JOSE

• Apple HTTP Live Streaming (Cupertino Streaming - iPhone, iPad, iPod touch) known as HTTP CUPERTINO

• Smooth Streaming (Microsoft Silverlight) known as HTTP SMOOTH

RTSP
RTSP/RTP/MPEG-TS (QuickTime, VLC, mobile devices, set top boxes, encoders)

RTMP
Real Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP - Adobe Flash Player)

For all streams you will see client type and you will be able to analyze how your customers access to your streams.