Multicast stream monitoring tools

Mon Jan 25 14:18:32 UTC 2016

On Mon, 25 Jan 2016 12:48:47 +0400
Murat Kaipov <mkaipov at outlook.com> wrote:

> Hello folks!We have an issue with some multicast streams. For some
> reason picture is very unstable in evening, during internet usage
> peak times. We have had monitor our links and uplinks and there
> wasn't any oversubscribtion. I looking for usefull multicast stream
> monitoring tool now. Any suggestion?

If it is not capacity saturation, it may have something be membership
stability.  Not knowing anything about your IP multicast configuration,
it is impossible to say anything concretely with certainty

This is to say however, you may want to also be sure to monitor
membership, interface, port, PIM, ..., states.

All the way down to spanning tree recalculation, you may not notice it
with unicast, but anything that might prevent a stream from being
forwarded due to a join state disruption are sometimes the causes of
these types of events.

It is a bit old and may not be the latest copy, but here is a copy of
Bill Nickless' very handy troubleshooting methodology you should have
handy:

  <https://nets.ucar.edu/nets/docs/procs/troubleshooting/troubleshooting-multicast.pdf>

Unfortunately there isn't much in that paper about Layer-2 related
issues as I alluded to above, but hopefully it gets you part of the
way there.

John