Media Streaming Metrics

Streaming Media Monitoring checks video and audio streaming services for performance, errors, and availability.

The monitoring agent connects to the media server, performs buffering, and plays the stream for 30 seconds. Then, the monitoring agent disconnects.

The monitoring agent will check for errors and also measures metrics, including Connection Time, Buffering Time, Received Packages, Buffering Packages, Frame Rate, and Average Bytes Per Second.

Descriptions of the Metrics

Connection – time value measured between sending the first request and getting the first frame of a media stream.

Duration – time when media source was in process. Depending on the method used by the streaming server (streaming vs. progressive download) duration may reflect the download of a sufficient part of the file for further analysis or the time engine spent on capturing the stream.

FPS – the ratio of all frames that we downloaded from the given stream to the total time of monitoring (connection + stream playback).

FPS = all downloaded frames / monitoring time

The Quality parameter is related to the network. It represents the ratio of received packets to lost packets on the network level for all streams. Note that the Quality parameter does not represent video quality but reflects the quality of the network connection. For example, due to high-speed networks lost packets can be successfully re-transmitted and packet loss will stay unnoticeable to an end-user.

WMP (Windows Media Player) – quality is  calculated by the formula Q = actual FPS / specified FPS