Planning for data that RTMON can send to application servers

Requirements for identifying data to be sent

For each logical application server group, you must identify in the RTMON configuration on the appliance the data that the appliance is to send to the application servers in that group. When you configure RTMON on an appliance, you identify for each application server group the user events and user attributes that the appliance is to send to the servers in the group. The application servers in the group receive data only about those user events and user attributes from the appliance. All servers in the application server group receive all the user events and user attributes that you specified for the group.

Your application server developers must program the application servers in the application server group that you have defined on the appliance to monitor for the user events and user attributes of interest that the appliance sends. See Chapter 3, RTMON API, for information about server setup.

User events and user attributes defined

User events provide information about the streaming activity that the user is performing, for example, viewing (playing) a video stream. User attributes provide details about each user event, for example, which user (client) is viewing the stream and how long the user has been viewing the stream.

Available user events

The appliance can send any or all of the following user events to servers in an application server group:

Connect
Play
Pause
Disconnect
Dropped events
Set-bitrate

See RTMON user event types for a description of each user event.

Available user attributes

The appliance can send to servers in an application server group any or all of the user attributes described in RTMON user attributes:

The value shown, for example, CONNECTED-TIME, is the XML value that your application server developer must use when programming the application server to use the RTMON API. You can use that value to look up a detailed description for each user attribute in Chapter 3, RTMON API.

Status events

You can configure the appliance to send status data to servers in an application server group. If the appliance sends status data, it sends

The appliance IP address
The current number of connected clients for each protocol
The average CPU usage over the interval set over the post
Average streaming downstream bandwidth, in kilobytes per second

Heartbeat events

You can configure the appliance to send heartbeat events at specified intervals. The appliance then sends a heartbeat event per period when no other events are pending. Configure your appliance to send heartbeat events to your application servers if you are interested in liveness reports indicating from the appliance.

A heartbeat event contains

A timestamp
The appliance IP address