2019年10月23日
By 1月时特约编辑
专题文章

Qosifire Review: Testing the Live Stream Monitor and Debugger

Qosifire is a roll-your-own live-stream monitoring 和调试ging service that lets you choose which streams to monitor, 从哪里监控他们, 以及每个月要花多少钱. 该服务的设置和访问都很简单, provides a variety of status 和调试ging 信息, 包括iOS和Android应用, 而且价格非常实惠. If you’ve been seeking an inexpensive monitoring system for your live streams, Qosifire值得一看.

在高层次上，Qosifire是这样工作的. 第一个, 选择要监视的流, which can be an HLS or Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) video stream or an Icecast audio stream (other protocols are coming). Then you install agents to access the stream and report back to the web service. The agent is a simple Linux program you can install in data centers or at any AWS or other cloud location to monitor delivery performance near relevant clumps of customers. 您会收到关于任何交付问题的电子邮件更新, or you can check the web console or iOS or Android apps for the latest data.

Qosifire is a service from Softvelum, the developer of the Nimble Streamer server/transcoder. 定价是基于订阅的. You pay $10/month for first 5 monitored streams and $1/month for each extra stream on top of that. There’s a 14-day free trial you can use to test the system, but there is no event-based pricing. 同样,一个免费一次性支票 is available for making check-up of any given stream without any sign up.

开始

您可以从如下所示的界面驱动Qosifire 图1, controlling streams and agent nodes on the top left and teams and users on the bottom left. The seven test streams I monitored during my testing are shown in the figure.

图1. Qosifire主控制台

Softvelum已经产生了广泛的入门指南帮助新用户启动和运行. 在本指南中，步骤1是在Ubuntu上安装代理节点, Debian, or CentOS systems with extensive documentation, including screencams, to guide your efforts. 安装完成后, you access the agents from the Nodes window; you can see the three set up for our testing in 图2. The logging mode controls the detail saved to the log file, with five modes available in increasing level of detail: none, 错误, 信息, 详细的, 和调试.

图2. The installed agent nodes for checking streams in Europe, the Far East, and the U.S.

添加一个流, 单击左上角的“添加流”按钮, 将URL放入指定的字段中, and then choose the protocol via the dropdown list shown on the right (图3). You can set the Alias name and assign nodes to check the stream and the verbosity of the Events log.

图3. 创建流

冰播是典型的纯音频流媒体, and the Icecast features tab provides access to capabilities like enabling/disabling silence detection (with noise and duration thresholds), 选择解码库(FFmpeg或libfdk_aac), 并决定是否分别检查每个通道. The Advanced settings tab lets you set the duration of history retained in the log, 通知时间间隔, 以及系统日志模式的冗长性.

As mentioned, Qosifire can now monitor three protocols: Icecast, HLS, and RTMP. 我询问了DASH支持, 我的Softvelum联系人说, “We definitely will do it; it’s just a matter of our development resources.“有趣的是, he commented that SRT support would be added before DASH, since its use is expanding and it presents critical issues for monitoring 和调试ging.

用户和团队

Most organizations will manage multiple streams and perhaps may assign different employees to monitor and control the streams. In Qosifire, you manage this with the concepts of users and teams. 用户分为admin和users两种. Admins get complete access to stats for all streams and can configure the system, while users can access stats for those teams they are assigned to.

A team creates a subset of streams that can be viewed by specifically assigned users. 默认情况下, every Qosifire installation has an Admins team that includes all streams from all nodes but is only accessible to admins. To this, you can add additional teams to control which users have access to which stats. 例如, 图4 shows the HLS team, which can access the four HLS test streams for all assigned nodes. (You can see both teams in the menu bar on the left in 图1.再一次), 任何管理员都可以查看所有这些统计信息, but only users assigned to a team can view the stats for any particular team.

图4. Creating a team for users who need access to HLS-related stats

数据分析

一旦你将一个节点分配给一个流, it connects with the specified URL and reports back on its experience in retrieving the data and, 以iccast为例, 播放直播. Qosifire doesn’t currently actually decode and play the video streams, so there’s no quality check or 错误 detection available. 而, 它下载所有的视频包和, 以HLS为例, 从编码阶梯的所有梯级中.

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