Cisco Cisco Video Assurance Management Solution 2.0 Information Guide
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Q&A
© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
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Cisco Video Assurance Management Solution 2.0
Solution Value Proposition
Q.
What is Cisco
®
Video Assurance Management Solution (VAMS) 2.0?
A.
Cisco VAMS focuses on video assurance by providing real-time centralized monitoring of broadcast video over
multicast. With this release, VAMS expands the scope of video assurance to cover not only a service provider’s
backbone, regional, and aggregation networks for video transport but also the headends and video hub offices
where all of the video acquisition and processing takes place. Cisco Video Assurance Management Solution 2.0
is a modular extensible architecture that also provides the framework for a flexible end-to-end assurance
platform for video.
Q.
What headend issues does the system address?
A.
VAMS 2.0 monitors traps forwarded from the ROSA™ Network Management System (NMS), which configures
and monitors video processing equipment in headends and video hub offices. In this release VAMS adds
support for the Digital Content Manager (DCM) and processes traps that contain multicast addresses so that
they can be correlated to the affected video services.
Three key areas make up the VAMS 2.0 scope:
●
Headend service monitoring application: The requirements of headend video services differ from those of
the core transport. As such, the existing VAMS components are not sufficient. The ROSA management
system will be used in this role for VAMS 2.0.
●
Service backup monitoring: Video services are often injected into the core network with a redundancy
model in place. Video redundancy protects subscribers of an outgoing transport stream by replacing failing
services with backup services and keeping disruption to a minimum.
●
Video quality monitoring
◦
ETR-290 first-priority alarms: Derived from the Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB) guidelines for
measuring video quality. A set of first-priority alarms has been defined for basic monitoring to assure that a
video flow transport stream can be properly decoded.
◦
Video service monitoring alerts: In addition to the first-priority alarms, additional monitoring capabilities
are to be included for the video transport streams in the headend or in locations where video acquisition
occurs. These alerts are intended to complement or supplement similar monitoring functions occurring in
the video probes.
Q.
What video transport issues does the system address?
A.
VAMS is targeted at:
●
Identifying video continuity errors
●
Identifying whether continuity errors are caused by the transport network or whether the transport network
can be eliminated as a source for these errors
●
Reducing the problem domain to identify where in the multicast distribution path the video service has been
affected
●
Correlate transport network anomalies with video anomaly detection, facilitating problem isolation and
diagnosis