Telestream announces ARGUS – The next step in centralized video monitoring management

Telestream, a global leader in workflow automation, media processing, and video quality monitoring, today announced ARGUS, its next generation centralized video monitoring management platform. Part of Telestream iQ solutions, ARGUS enables automated surveillance of each video transition point with data aggregation from monitoring probes across the video delivery chain. It provides high-level dashboard views of service performance as well as deep dive analytics data, enabling service providers to quickly identify video quality issues and their root causes.

ARGUS introduces a new distributed system architecture for scaling the number of monitoring points from small to large, enabling a true consolidated single pane of glass for management and analytics. This means probes can be deployed across various regions or even countries all connected to the same centralized management system. Service providers no longer need to manage probes across complex distribution networks through multiple independent management systems. ARGUS also takes advantage of a new microservices architecture optimized for virtual environments to support service providers’ migration to cloud deployments.

“ARGUS was developed in response to the needs of OTT service providers who require large scale comprehensive monitoring,” says Charlie Dunn, SVP, Video Quality Monitoring and Analytics Business Unit. “It provides the ability to correlate video quality and performance metrics at large scale across the entire delivery chain into a single pane of glass.”

Video service providers are often challenged by the problem of quickly identifying the source of video quality issues in their video delivery service as the video content transitions from one step to the next in a complex video delivery chain. Compared to other video quality monitoring tools that only show a video delivery problem at the end point, ARGUS is designed to solve this challenge by collecting data from each monitoring point and then presenting that data in a way that quickly indicates where the problem began.

ARGUS aggregates QoE and QoS metrics from different video analysis probes including Inspector LIVE, Sentry, Surveyor TS and the Surveyor ABR solution. It performs program level correlation across the aggregated data and presents an easily understood visualization of the status of media quality and network delivery. It provides real-time and historical views of video quality metrics and turns substantial amounts of data from different monitoring points into actionable, business intelligent insights.

With its “pay-as-you-grow” business model, the distributed system architecture within ARGUS enables users to scale the number of monitoring points from small to large with a usage-based model. This allows for long-term growth of the system to any size without a large up-front cost. Continuously scalable for users with dozens or hundreds of monitoring probes, existing iVMS ASM customers who were limited by scale can now upgrade to ARGUS while protecting their prior investment.

Additional key benefits of ARGUS include real-time correlation of monitoring data across the video delivery chain with alert visualization of active alarms at a glance. Plus in-depth troubleshooting to pinpoint the root cause of issues such as compression artifacts, transport stream impairments, and network delivery issues. ARGUS delivers comprehensive performance reports to benchmark video network and operations using aggregated data and analyze historical trends by program, flow, and monitoring points.

“The name ARGUS comes from the 100-eye giant in Greek Mythology who was characterized as all-seeing,” says Dunn. “That’s exactly what our centralized video monitoring platform is.” BCS Bureau