Real-time passive and active monitoring of Adaptive Streaming and Content Delivery Network protocols

To retain viewers watching video content over the Internet, providers need to create a reliable, high-quality experience. Adaptive streaming technologies enable an optimum viewing experience of high quality video streamed over large distributed HTTP networks across a diverse range of fixed and mobile devices on a broad set of connection speeds. Adaptive bit rate technologies are significantly more operationally complex than traditional streaming technologies.

IQDialogue^® ASM is a next-generation probe used to monitor, analyze, and troubleshoot adaptive streaming protocols and networks, simplifying operational complexities and improving the viewer experience. IQDialogue ASM, a plug and play probe that automatically identifies all the adaptive streaming protocols, provides information and metrics on the overall service delivery platform in a comprehensive and simple format.

IQDialogue ASM provides publishing monitoring to ensure the assets are delivered correctly to the origin servers. Also, IQDialogue ASM passively monitors the content delivery from the origin server to the client end device, providing QoS metrics and key performance indicators of the control plane and client sessions.

IQDialogue ASM allows users to measure the performance of the service, per user-session metrics and diagnostics, and many other parameters allowing for quick and accurate performance review and fault identification and isolation.

Key Features

• Extensive monitoring, alarming and logging of adaptive streaming protocols
• Simultaneous support for active and passive monitoring on both live and VOD style content
• Support for IneoQuest's VeriStream technology
• Rich and extensible Dashboard GUI, with KPIs, queries, census views, and more
• Dynamic parsing of playlists with support for multi-level playlists
• Ability to import/export active client profiles
• Support for monitoring of Apple^® HLS, Microsoft^® Smooth Streaming, RTSP, web publishing (HTTP Put & WebDAV), Over-the-Top traffic (YouTube^®, Netflix^®, and others)
• Full libpcap capture of monitored traffic
• Auto-detection of signaling and vendor protocols, little to no pre-configuration required

ASM Signaling Overview

IQDialogue ASM provides visual representation of all aspects of the various Adaptive Streaming protocols. Classification is done in real-time on type and status, with easy to understand census, color-coding and Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

Over 1 Gb of monitoring capacity of measurements and analysis such as:

• VeriStream measurements and analysis of monitored sessions
• Full timing and auditing of the HTTP requests and responses
• Full timing and auditing of RTSP based messaging
• Monitoring and alarming of HTTP response error codes (4XX, 5XX) and redirects (3XX)

Unique Feature Set

When analysis just isn't enough, IQDialogue ASM can perform special functions like "Content Preservation" (for HLS content), allowing for a unique copy of each segment/chunk requested by the clients to be saved for more detailed off-line analysis.

The Query function provides rich and informative data on past adaptive streaming user sessions, allowing for a forensic analysis of the end-user session.

Key Performance Indicators

In addition to real-time monitoring and census view, IQDialogue ASM presents to the user a rich set of Key Performance Indicators. The KPIs are interactive in nature and provide the end-user with various views of the service delivery platform performance and data points.

• Throughput analysis (sessions, MB/sec manifests, and more)
• Enhanced analysis of HTTP header information (user-agent, cookies, tokens, etc.)