Touchstream ISP Insights: plugging the gap in content delivery monitoring
Touchstream’s award-winning solution ISP Insights (Internet Service Provider Insights) is the first ever data optimisation dashboard in OTT monitoring that illustrates the data flow from the CDN through the last-mile of video delivery in an intuitive way, highlighting issues along its path. Using a summarisation engine with data optimisation techniques in combination with ultra-fast efficient dashboards, ISP Insights enables OTT operations teams and streaming engineers to visually pinpoint trouble spots between CDN edge nodes and ISP’s ASNs (Autonomous System Numbers).
Streaming operators currently have a blindspot in their end-to-end monitoring: they cannot see ISP data. The majority of critical streaming issues occur within the ISP domain, between CDNs and player analytics, where both OTT operators and viewers are experiencing the greatest frustration and ultimately poor QoE. On one hand, operators are unable to pinpoint a streaming issue’s root cause, hence bad QoE, and on the other, viewers expect premium QoE when paying for a subscription. This domain is the last significant area in OTT monitoring without any crucial deep instrumentation.
Taking into consideration the real-time issues highlighted by our customers, Touchstream has specifically designed and built a CDN-ISP monitoring tool to support superior QoE. ISP Insights empowers streaming operators giving them a powerful layer of visualisation of the issues previously invisible and unreachable to solve, enabling faster troubleshooting with less resources. ISP Insights’ granular KPI capability at scale is integral to streaming engineers when pinpointing issues, and it underpins them in their delivery of a superior QoE.
The product’s visualisation dashboard is designed to mimic the data flow, making it extremely easy for Network Operations Centre (NOC) personnel to understand the nature and the precise location of any streaming delivery issue, while displaying the root cause in an intuitive way. Once an issue is detected, the dashboard incorporates a pop-up menu that provides shortcuts, allowing an operator to drill into their own CDN log data to investigate it in greater detail.
ISP Insights collects key performance indicators (KPIs) that are critical in highlighting issues in OTT delivery like high cache miss ratio and low throughput indicating video buffering. Before, it was almost impossible for operators to support millions of concurrent viewers generating millions of CDN log lines. With ISP Insights streaming engineers can complete a deep analysis and with it can pinpoint which particular ASN and from what specific edge node the issues originated.
ISP Insights is designed to be secure, efficient and economical. Rather than ingesting the raw CDN log data, Touchstream provides a summarisation plugin that resides in the customer domain. With this all PII (Personally Identifiable Information) data remains in the customer domain, making the solution completely secure by design. Finally but equally important, with no need to re-ingest the log data the solution is extremely cost-effective.
Touchstream’s ISP Insights ushers in a new era of essential deep visibility of OTT delivery and troubleshooting, allowing even greater control over QoE resulting in improved Net Promoter Score (NPS) and reduced subscriber churn rate.
