Alerts and Advices
Introduction
The general purpose of stream alerts is providing more transparent insights about the current live stream performances, estimated causes and possible solutions. Alerts offer mutliple capabilities to take immediate action and therefore improve the streaming experience for your audience.
The current version supports ingest related quality and performance issues of the first mile, meaning from your ingest point via your ISP to our nearest ingest server.
Before starting
To begin, please sign in using your nanoStream Cloud/Bintu account credentials.
If you have not created an account yet, you can sign up or reach out to our dedicated sales team via the contact form or by sending an email to sales(at)nanocosmos.de.
Alerts are effortlessly activated for all organizations by default.
Starting from version 3.7.1.0 onwards, beside the Analytics Dashboard, the nanoStream Cloud Dashboard provides a seamless way to access alerts, ensuring a streamlined experience for your organization.
How to use
Analytics API
Our Analytics API provides 2 different alerting routes:
Click here to dive into the alerting routes and visit our nanoStream Analytics API developer documentation.
GETIngest stream alerts/advices: Returns all detected alerts and advices for all live ingest streams in the last 15 minutes.POSTCustom ingest stream alerts/advices: Returns all detected alerts and advices for all live ingest streams in the last 15 minutes. Additionally, through this API route, it is possible to pass ingest streams that should either be excluded from detection or define ingest streams for which an alert should be triggered if they are detected as offline.
nanostream Cloud Dashboard
You can view Alerts and Advices of your organization directly on the nanoStream Cloud Dashboard.
3.7.1.0With the release of version 3.7.1.0, the nanoStream Cloud Dashboard has enhanced its user interface in addition to the Analytics Dashboard.
For a detailed guide and additional insights in regards of the Alerts and Advices feature, please refer to the cloud dashboard's documentation page. This resource offers explanations to ensure you make the most out of the features available.
Screenshot: Alerts and Advices
Severity Levels
Alerts are categorized in multiple severity levels, that should help to prioritize them:
| Severity | Priority | Estimated Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Critical | highest | These stream alerts have the highest priority and might also have to biggest impact on the streaming experience in a fundamental way. You should engage these issues first. |
| Moderate | high | Such notifications can be considered as urgent. If there are no other critical alerts, try solving these next. |
| Minor | low | The corresponding issue might partially affecting the stream quality. |
| Advices | info | This can be seen as a general info about unused streaming potential. Please consider reading the advice message or refer to the advice codes in the table below. |
Lastly we fire an Advice for non-ABR streams with a higher bitrate than 4 MBit on every RTMP stat event. If you encounter such an advice, please consider using transcoding profiles (Activating ABR) to insure a better streaming experience for clients located in lower bandwith regions.
Alert Definitions
The used analysis algorithm for this alerting feature is based on the stream quality and performance logs of the previous 15 minutes. The analysis for live stream alerts is executed every minute. The considered time ranges for the calculation are:
- end of time range:
start of current minute - start of time range:
end - 15 minutes
To fire up alerts we make use of 4 RTMP stats events for each minute. 60 events are collected in total for the given maximum range of 15 minutes. These events contain information regarding the stream time ratio, which is used to identify potential ingest stream performance/quality issues in order to classify them and raise corresponding alerts. This specific stat can be examined in detail using the troubleshooting feature on the Analytics Dashboard.
Each alert is part of an specific alert category and owns a unique alert code.
General Alerts
General alerts include basic issues related to unexpected ingest behavior.
- General alert codes are ranging from 21000 to 21999
Stability Alerts
Stream issues that may appear as a consequence of irregular communication problems with the nanoStream Cloud can be identified through stability alerts. Therefore the stream restart attempts are getting analysed. Meeting the condition of having at least 6 restarts within the 15 minute range fires a Continous Restarts Alert.
- Stability alert codes are ranging from 22000 to 22999
Performance Alerts
Either bandwidth issues or insufficient encoder/computing performances of the ingest source can be observed by fired performance alerts.
- Performance alert codes are ranging from 23000 to 23999
Stream Time Ratio
Classification by Stream Time Ratio (STR) Metric
If the average of all stream time ratio (STR) values is ≤ 0.9, the stream has potential performance issues. Further classifications follow by matching the given conditions in one of these cases below for at least 5 stream time ratio values. If one case is true, a performance alert is created for this particular stream.
Suboptimal Performance (Troubleshooting Example)
Poor Performance (Troubleshooting Example)
Infrastructure Alerts
Infrastructure alerts represent issues that may be invisble from the outside of our infrastructure and even if there are no direct impairments stream performance/quality wise, these issues can lead to critical problems. Alerts of this category serve especially as early notification system, so taking action is immediately possible. Occuring problems with the underlying Infrastructure of the corresponding stream are detected by analysing just the passthrough (non-transcoding) streams. Finding multiple references on different server instances fires a Duplicated Ingest Alert. Depending on the passthrough ingest location or source, the specific alert varies slightly.
- Infrastructure alert codes are ranging from 24000 to 24999
Steps to solve alerted issues
These guidelines can be used to get an idea about what the problem is, why it is appearing and how to encounter any kind of alert code in general.
1. Open up the corresponding stream playback within the dashboard and look out for anomalies, like continous buffering, stuttering, visual interferences or connection issues.
2. Execute a hard restart of the ingest connection / encoder source to force application to restart the ingest process.
3. Use the direct link to the Troubleshooting Page right below the alert to investigate the ingest stream, while looking for anomalies within the stream duration, like performance drops or occurred errors. Using the provided direct link of the alert is automatically filling the necessary data and you can begin to troubleshoot right away. If you do not know what to look for, please consider taking a look at these examples.
4. If the alert persists, please use the support link of the corresponding alert below to submit a ticket with the necessary details.
Alert Codes
[21000 - 21999]
| Code | Type | Description | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21001 | Offline | The ingest stream is offline, but is expected to ingest. | Restart the stream. |
[22000 - 22999]
| Code | Type | Description | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| 22001 | Continous Restarts | The ingest stream starts and stops continuously. | Restart the stream. |
[23000 - 23999]
| Code | Type | Description | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| 23001 | Suboptimal Performance | The ingest streaming is not optimal; ultra-low latency reliant apps may be affected.. | Restart the stream and do a bandwith speedtest afterwards. |
| 23002 | Poor Performance | The ingest streaming is malfunctioning. |
[24000 - 24999]
| Code | Type | Description | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24100 | Duplicated Ingests | Duplicated ingests detected. | Stop all the ingests using the same stream name from all machines/encoders/locations and restart only 1 from the intended machine/encoder/location. Review ingest workflow. |
| 24101 | Multiple Infrastructures | Duplicated ingests found on varying infrastructures. | |
| 24102 | Multiple Locations | Duplicated ingests found across different locations. | |
| 24103 | Multiple IPs | Duplicated ingests have different IP addresses. |
Advice Codes
Advices can be seen as low priority alerts and shall inform you about possible improvements of the stream configuration.
| Code | Description | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|
| 29001 | The ingest stream has a high bitrate. Viewers with poor connection might not be able to playback the stream smoothly. | Consider to use adaptive bitrate streams with different transcoding profiles. |