Managing Cisco Medianet with LiveAction
Cisco Medianet Media Monitoring
A Presentation by Cisco Technical Lead Aamer Akhter
View Presentation and Demo
Access and visualize Cisco Medianet capabilities using LiveAction software
Medianet is a Cisco term used to describe an infrastructure that is enhanced to support the delivery of video. Cisco has incorporated Medianet capabilities into their Borderless Network Architecture, and in Cisco’s words, Medianet “cuts across endpoints and infrastructure to leverage the intelligence in the network and take away complexity.”
Video: Keith Parsons demonstrates LiveAction's Medianet capabilities—9:49
Why Medianet? Why Now?
Video technology has been advancing rapidly such that the capture, production and sharing of video content is made easier every day. This advancement in video technology results in advancements in collaborative business uses that increase productivity and lower operating costs. Cisco in particular has taken notice of this trend and projects that business video conferencing will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 57% from 2009 to 2014.
Mediatrace
The Mediatrace functionality allows users to troubleshoot media-based flows by gathering specific information related to performance from the various hops that the particular flow takes. LiveAction makes this capability easy-to-use by simply selecting the flow to troubleshoot, automatically invoking the commands, and displaying the results for easy analysis.
With LiveAction you can visually follow a Mediatrace stream across the network.
Colors indicate conditions at each location. Tabular data provides statistics for each hop.
(Click image to enlarge)
Medianet IP SLA VO (Video Operation)
IP SLA VO (video operation) is a video version of Cisco’s synthetic traffic generation and analysis for Telepresence, IPTV and IP video surveillance traffic types. Each of these test types mimics the bandwidth characteristics of their respective real traffic.
In the screen shot below, LiveAction is monitoring an IP SLA VO Telepresence test. As you can see in the graph the synthetic traffic is bursting up to around 6.5 Mbs, which is what you would expect of an HD video conferencing session.
LiveAction Monitoring an IP SLA VO Telepresence Test
Click image to enlarge.
LiveAction allows you to graphically manage IP SLA VO by configuring the tests and displaying the results. This is extremely useful when you’re preparing for a video deployment and you need to understand the impact video traffic will have on your infrastructure and any QoS policies that are in place.
Another use case is for post-incident troubleshooting where you don’t have access to the video endpoints and you need to recreate the problem. Here are a couple of screen shots of the video test setup and some results.
Setting up a quick IP SLA VO Telepresence test using LiveAction.
Click image to enlarge.
Sample IP SLA VO test results.
Click on images to enlarge.
Medianet Performance Monitor
Medianet Performance Monitor is a specialized version of NetFlow primarily used to gather performance metrics for RTP and TCP traffic. The primary use case is to monitor and troubleshoot performance of specific types of critical traffic like voice, video, and data.
Click image to enlarge.
In the screen shot above for a Catalyst 3750 you can see some of the Performance Monitoring DSCP, RTP SSRC and jitter information in the first few columns.
