Multicast stream monitoring tools

Mon Jan 25 14:41:25 UTC 2016

If you are in the  Video content delivery business using mcast then these folks are one of the leaders.  You can put multiple probes and make sure your mcast coming off source is solid, through the core router solid, and at the edge...   http://www.ineoquest.com/  they are not cheap but worth every dollar  

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of John Kristoff
Sent: Monday, January 25, 2016 8:19 AM
To: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Multicast stream monitoring tools

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