Wowza server management via simple web control panel

Wowza Developer Dojo
1

Greetings,

WMSPanel, which recently became one of Wowza product partners, is glad to announce Wowza server management available via our unified web interface.

It allows

  • Showing Wowza virtual hosts, starting and stopping them;

  • Run/stop startup streams;

  • Show applications list for each VHost;

  • Create, control, manage and delete applications;

  • Edit applications via both user-friendly wizard and raw XML config right from your browser;

  • Create and re-use application templates;

  • Start instances of applications;

  • Set application RTMP and RTSP user/password authentication.

  • All actions may be applied to multiple Wowza servers at once.

    Additional streams control is available, so you can start/stop/re-set them on multiple servers at once via MediaCaster. You can also record streams via LiveStreamRecord add-on. User permissions management may allow your end-users to be able to do the same, so you won’t need to log in to each server manually to do your users’ job.

    No remote connection, no SSH, no JMX. Just install WMSPanel agent once and then all actions are taken via the service web interface. Works excellent on any browser including PC, Mac, Android and iOS (looks amazing on iPad!).

    WMSPanel also provides WMSAuth restriction and control feature set described in this forum post. This approach is extended with Pay-per-view framework for Wowza that provides per-user control.

    Excellent reporting provides the following statistics:

  • Connections: total and per-protocol amount

  • Traffic and peak bandwidth

  • Geo-location and ISP networks

  • Durations and timing

  • Devices and players

    WMSPanel may be available via white label with your own domain and branding.

    This works well for both Wowza 2 and Wowza 3 server versions under any OS.

    WMSPanel is provided via SaaS subscription model.

    You can try this functionality free of charge. Sign up and try it during 2-week trial period.

    Wowza Consultant? Read how you can use WMSPanel, its reporting and PPV capabilities in your workflow.

    Check our latest features and updates in team blog and follow us on Twitter.

2

Hi!

We are glad to add that WMSPanel now allows making group operations like adding new application to several servers at once or changing applications settings. Once an administrator chooses to create a new application or to edit one, he may do it on multiple servers just by clicking on their names.

This might be extremely useful to those admins who rule dozens of servers on a daily basis.

3

Greetings,

I’d also like add a few words about WMSPanel rich reporting capabilities.

Real-time stats

Last 2 minutes’ connections count, bandwidth and top 20 countries of current visits

Daily statistics

4

Hi,

Check out Wowza server performance metrics available at WMSPanel.

It has real-time and retrospective charts for CPU, physical memory and swap memory load. It does not require JMX as it uses native Java methods used by our Wowza add-on.

It’s perfectly displayed on desktop, iOS and Android browsers.

You can see it in action for your servers after free service sign up.

5

We’re glad to announce a new billing feature set.

Based on data slices concept, it allows setting up billing parameters for your clients and calculate amounts for further charge based on traffic information.

You can find further details in this billing blog post.

6

Hi,

Check our latest daily statistics screencast which includes:

7

Hi,

We got new screen cast describing our data slices concept as well as showing the panel to your customers via white label with custom domain and logo.

Check this out:

[video=youtube;jzZ1AsIT4N4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzZ1AsIT4N4[/video]

8

Recently the list of our interface language has increased and it now includes:

  • English

  • Spanish

  • Portuguese

  • Italian

  • Russian

    Both website and Dashboard pages are translated.

    Having native interface language helps your customers to browse their reports in a natural way. Our customers are actively participating in translation which makes those localizations being a “real-life” ones. So if any language is missing, just let us know.

9

Have a moment to take a look at our cloud architecture which makes our service reliable, scalable and robust.

10

There are several updates made during last several weeks, let’s see what we’ve got.

  1. Today we introduced Devices and players report available as part of daily statistics. You can see separate report for devices and for players/browsers.

  1. Admin users may now delegate some functions to their end-users which access their assets via white label panels. This includes the ability to set up server configuration and the ability to create custom data slices.

  2. Speaking of white label: we’ve added CSS customization capabilities to customers’ branded panels.

  3. Some ready-to-use application configuration templates has been added to the system. They include simple cases for beginner streamers as well as sophisticated templates for origin-edge configs for Wowza re-streaming.

11

With the latest Wowza release our team is glad to announce that WMSPanel Wowza agent has full support for Wowza Streaming Engine 4.0.

All excellent reporting features work perfectly along with streaming hotlink protection, pay-per-view feature set and multiple servers management.

Please read this blog post to learn more how WMSPanel fits Wowza 4 feature set.

12

Our customer and long time collaborator Thomas Gires has recently created “The Paranoid’s Guide to Internet Video Streaming” expresses his experience in video streaming.

The guide has step-by-step instruction of integrating Wowza Streaming Engine with WMSPanel’s pay-per-view feature set, including samples for building PPV handler.

Please read a full text copy of Guide to Internet Video Streaming in our blog.

13

The migration procedure is easy.

  1. Install Wowza 4 and move your applications and settings according to Wowza migration procedure.

  2. Copy lib\WowzaAgentInstaller.jar file and lib\wmspanel-lib folder to new server.

  3. Copy Server.xml to new server. If Server.xml cannot be copied due to some special settings, copy the following properties:

  • PanelUrl

  • PanelUuid

  • PanelPassword

and also copy the following server listener:

com.wmspanel.WmsPanelAgent

  • If you use WMSAuth hotlinking protection or other paywall features, also copy ServerAuthorizationProperties

If you have any questions or issues, please contact our support team.

14

Wowza server admins may now get email alerts for CPU and RAM level of consumption.

Each server in the panel may be assigned a threshold for both RAM and CPU. When the threshold is overrun, a notification is sent to designated users and it’s repeated every hour until all is settled.

Since any WMSPanel account many have any number of Wowza servers, you can monitor infrastructure of any size.

Read this blog post for set up details.

15

Internet Service Providers (ISP) report is now available as part of our daily statistics.

It has amount of connections per service provider with their overall share. You may select top ISPs as well as filter them by name.

Top-10 chart shows most popular providers as well as “long tail”.

16

WMSPanel now has in-depth reporting for Wowza Streaming Engine. It shows reports for each individual stream and file available on any number of Wowza Streaming Engine instances in your account.

Each file and stream has its own reporting:

  • Per-file and per-stream set of statistics.

  • Connections total and per-protocol amount.

  • Outgoing and incoming traffic amount.

  • Timing and duration periods with connections amount.

  • Devices and players two-dimensions reports.

    Reporting includes:

  • Filtering by files and streams names via regular expression.

  • Sorting by number of connections, traffic, average and total play time.

  • Any dates range can be specified, total stats calculated per selected period.

  • The data is collected into 1 day buckets.

  • All statistics are available per slice, you may allow users to browse portions of data.

  • Storage time is defined per data slice.

  • For more information and screenshots please visit digest page.

17

WMSPanel team introduces API reference of WMSPanel cloud control panel for Wowza Streaming Engine:

https://wmspanel.com/api_info

WMSPanel collects data from any number of Wowza servers and processed it for further reporting via white label. Now you may also obtain the aggregate data via pull API available via HTTPS connection. This includes

  • Real-time data for connections and bandwidth

  • In-depth daily statistics for individual streams and files

  • Daily stats for connections, traffic, playtime, peak bandwidth, players and devices.

    Several WMSPanel services also have push API which allows receiving prompt alerts and re-act accordingly:

  • Dispersa streams offline / online alerts

  • RTMP publish / unpublish streams alerts

  • Wowza offline alerts

    Feel free to visit API reference for more details and usage examples.

18

An interesting update to our API feature set.

We’ve added methods to obtain geo-location and Internet Service Provider statistics.

Read this article for more details and check API reference for more details.

19

WMSPanel reporting feature set has been updated with Unique viewers metric. It allows collecting unique visitors count within each day for all or selected servers, specific data slices or even individual stream or file.

You can try it in action during 2-weeks trial period.

20

If I was using your service with Wowza 3, how can I update to Wowza 4, anything special to do?