Monitoring and understanding the health charts of your streams give you insights into what could have gone wrong and how to avoid them in the future.
How to View the Stream Health Charts from Your Dashboard
With Castr, you can check the health charts of both real-time and past streams. If your stream is live, you will see the real-time chart. If you want to see the analytics of the previous stream, you can see them in the Stream Session History.
To access the health charts of a stream, you can:
Click on Bitrate on the information bar to open the charts directly.
Click on Analytics and select Input Health.
If you want to review a previous stream session, click Stream Session History.
If your stream is finished, you can select a date range and click on Show Details to view the data in different periods.
Understanding the Stream Health Chart
By default, Castr will show the entire stream health Overview. To drill down further into a segment, you can click on Show Metrics Between to select a specific range or other options that you see fit.
All charts have 2 lines:
High: The highest value in a certain period
Low: The lowest value in a certain period
Unless the stream is very long, in most cases, the values of High and Low will be the same.
To disable/enable a High or Low chart, just click on it.
There are 4 charts that provide different aspects of the stream health:
Delays: It represents how stable the internet connection is. If the connection is unstable, the graph will contain spikes at regions (which indicates high delays). Spikes in the Delay chart might result in disrupted streams.
It is recommended that you use a stable internet connection so that the graph stays as linear as possible for good streaming.
Video Bitrate: This represents the amount of video data transferred for a particular duration. The Constant Bitrate setting is recommended for stable streaming, which will be presented in the graph as a flat line.
Audio Bitrate: This represents the amount of audio data transferred for a particular duration. The line should be kept as flat as possible for stable audio streaming.
Frame Rate: This represents the frequency (rate) at which consecutive images (frames) are captured or displayed. If there are any drops in frames, they will be captured in this graph.
If you want to zoom into a certain period in the chart, you can scroll to that certain point as shown below:
Note: Data is retained for a period of 14 days. Following this timeframe, information pertaining to that session will no longer be available.
Hopefully, the information above will help you understand more about what went wrong on a stream and how to avoid interruptions. Happy streaming!