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Chapter 10 Logging and Monitoring
Monitoring Media-IXT traffic
Media-IXT lets you monitor streaming performance from the Monitor:Protocols page of Traffic Manager. The
same statistics can be viewed from the command line using Traffic Line.
The statistics monitored this way are not as accurate as those in Media-IXT’s log files. They are convenient,
useful for verifying that Media-IXT is serving content, but the numbers they provide should not be considered
authoritative. See the previous section of this chapter for information about Media-IXT log files, which are the
more authoritative source for performance information.
For detailed information about Traffic Manager and Traffic Line, see the HP Cache Server Appliance
Administrator Guide.
Be aware that the HP Cache Server Appliance Administrator Guide discussion of Traffic Manager, may not
document the following metrics:
• on the Dashboard page, client throughput and active clients/servers are counted for Windows Media
Technologies
• on the Protocols page, there is a WMT (Windows Media Technologies) category, showing Open
Connections, Request Bytes, and Response Bytes for both Client and Server
About MRTG and Media-IXT
MRTG (Multi Router Traffic Grapher) is a graphing tool for monitoring Traffic Server performance and
analyzing network traffic. MRTG does not support Media-IXT 4.x, so MRTG statistics for Document Hit Rate,
Cache Hit Latency, Cache Miss Latency, Cache Usage, Hit/Miss Count and Error/Abort Count all show zero,
for all formats.
About live streams and Traffic Manager
How the Traffic Manager graphical user interface and the Traffic Line command line interface handle live
streams requires some explanation.
For all three streaming formats:
• Live streams show up as??? in Traffic Manager and Traffic Line.
For RealNetworks:
• RealNetworks live streams never show up in Traffic Manager or Traffic Line.
Because RealProxy completely bypasses the Traffic Server component of Media-IXT for live requests, live
clips served by Media-IXT do not appear in Traffic Manager or Traffic Line. Likewise, Media-IXT logs do
not record these requests.
For WMT:
• Client and server connections show up normally.
For QuickTime:
• Media-IXT counts the number of unique live streams that it is splitting, not the number of players receiving
the live split streams.
When Media-IXT is receiving two different live streams from origin QuickTime servers, and splitting these
two streams among 10 QuickTime players, Traffic Manager shows two (not 10) live QuickTime streams.
NOTE You can also monitor the RealProxy directly from the RealProxy user interface. Refer to
RealProxy online help.