Page 11 - ADVANCING AOIP FOR BROADCAST

SN
Networks never seem to get smaller. They expand and grow and get more complicated. If you plan to follow along, you will want to look into SNMP monitoring and management tools.
MP
Just about anything that hangs o an IP network can be monitored using Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), which is used to monitor and manage data from servers, switches, hubs and IP audio networks like our WheatNet-IP.
Because
SNMP monitoring can tell you if a par cular port is dropping packets or if a device is hea ng up and about to fail. It can show you data packets coming in or going out, by the port or by the link, and from the mic processors on out to the transmi er.
Networks
Not all network devices, or even IP audio networks, have SNMP monitoring capability. They need to generate MIB, or Management Informa on Base, les. For example, the BLADE I/O access units that make up our WheatNet-IP network each have a unique MIB le with hundreds of data points, and each BLADE has a unique object address in the network for SNMP monitoring and aler ng purposes.
Don’t Get
Smaller.
This data can be useful for aler ng you by email or text if silence is detected by a cri cal BLADE in the network, for example.
The MIB le tells about the opera on of the BLADE
or group of BLADEs, such as packet rates, changing bitrates or opera ng temperatures and overall health of the BLADE. (For security reasons, we’ve
set some of these data points as read-only, while others are set as read- and-write and therefore can be manipulated and controlled.) Other MIB
les for servers and switches contain relevant data per nent to the opera on of those units. MIB data can be organized by the device or grouped in tables for viewing, say, a par cular stream of data running across the network.
Pictured above is a single example of the depth of data you can have access to with SNMP. This shows all the data associated with a single sensor monitoring tra c on a ber link. This image is from a commercial tool called PRTG.
To view MIB les, you will need a MIB browser, which can tell you things like if the
fan speed in a par cular server is o and you need to replace it. But if you want to do more with SNMP, you’ll need an SNMP management tool that lets you manipulate MIB data using basic SNMP commands such as GET, SET and TRAP. By sending a TRAP message, for example, the client device can alert the SNMP manager to condi ons like a CPU that’s overhea ng, if a router port is no longer responding or if a hard drive is approaching full status. If you don’t already have an SNMP manager, there are several decent freeware suites like this one: h p:/www.dart.com/snmp-free-manager.aspx and several like this one by Paessler: h ps:/www.paessler.com/info/snmpclient that you can download on a free trial.
Our eld engineers work regularly with SNMP, and can answer most of your ques ons about se ng up an SNMP monitoring and aler ng system for your WheatNet-IP network that will work for your purposes.
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