Facility remote
monitoring
Parsing words carefully can sometimes lead to inter- esting results. This topic ould cover monitoring
over a large distance, or it could
cover gathering information about
systems within one facility. Then
again, it could mean monitoring
many facilities from one location. It
seems to me that in the context of
our changing industry, it needs to
cover all three.
Increasingly, broadcasters are involved in one of many variants of
centralized operations. That is often
meant to construe centralized master control, though it could easily
mean traffic, promotions or even a
common transmitter facility for a region. When viewed from the vantage
point of the central facility, remote
monitoring often means gathering
information on the status of the remote facility and, most importantly,
displaying it in a way that operators
can quickly get a sense of the health
of the remote location. Today, that
means several kinds of information.
SNMP
For a centralized master control,
it is important to access data about
hardware as well as credible video to
understand the end result of any potential failures noted by remote sensing. For instance, an SNMP monitoring system might report a failure in a
video server, but what is more valuable to know is what the video and
audio outputs look and sound like.
By using a combination of IT-based
remote sensing and return of confidence feeds as compressed audio and
video, we can gain a much better view
of the status.
SNMP is a great tool and is
integrated into the monitoring sys-
tems delivered by a number of manu-
facturers in our “space.” SNMP has
three elements. Devices must have
resident capabilities to respond to
requests from a local SNMP moni-
toring system. The final element is
a system that generates requests and
aggregates responses into a practical
user interface. There are a number of
SNMP management software pack-
ages that can be used both for IT- and
broadcast-centric hardware.
Monitoring
systems that are
more media-aware
can allow for better
fault finding and
smoother operation
than multipurpose
IT-centric systems.
In our industry, it is often more
convenient to buy the monitoring
software along with modular equipment (DAs, conversion hardware,
etc.). This can have two major benefits. First, there can be tight coupling between fault reporting and
fault repair with control over a router,
perhaps switching to a backup in
the event of a failure of a particular
circuit. Second, by merging signal
transport hardware and the monitoring system into a closely coupled system, it is easy to get reports from each
piece of modular conversion and distribution hardware about the health
of the signal.
Consolidation
Of course there are other benefits to
merging the facility monitoring into a
small number of components. It be-
comes easy to have a single interface
that is used to both monitor and con-
trol devices. This can permit operators
to make adjustments when things are
not quite perfect, like perhaps swap-
ping audio tracks to remain on the
air with a usable signal. Carrying it
one step further, it is easy to see how
a graphical user interface could, for
instance, turn a defective device from
green to red when a fault occurs, and
with a simple mouse click permit the
operator to bring up details about the
fault. This could, of course, include
pictures and sound to a larger monitor
to permit quality evaluation.
IT hardware
Today, we live in an increasingly hybridized world where purpose-built
video and audio hardware has to interface well with IT-centric hardware.
For example, we now find station-in-a-box systems for master control
that are entirely IT-based, except for
interface cards for live feeds.
