The VBC provides a powerful central management and status display of services monitored by Bridge Technology probes.

The VBC gives unprecedented insight into network health and the flow of media streams. Key elements in the VBC are: configuration management, stream status monitoring, service status monitoring, 4-day historical data-display using a Microtimeline™ view, SNMP multi-destination trap forwarding, alarm logging and PDF report generation.

The VBC controller software is deployed in a Linux server environment offering powerful and standardised network access techniques such as SSH, telnet, FTP, XML, HTTP and SNMP. Users connect to the server by using a standard web browser as the client. The VBC collects summarised data from probes and presents alarms filtered by user selectable thresholds and aggregation times, thus providing the high-level overview needed in a large system while still allowing users to drill-down for detailed alarm and measurement information.

At the high level in a large system, minor error incidents should be masked to avoid a confusing user interface. To cope with the possibility of alarm storming due to a major error being reflected at several stages in a signal chain the VBC uses two techniques: windowing functionality and alarm aggregation. The windowing functionality ensures that only persisting errors and errors occurring frequently will result in high level alarms. The total level of errors, summed over a specified time window, must exceed a threshold before a high level alarm is raised.

“Extensive administration tools allow only specific users with the rights to configure and manage the access level of users and provide control flexibility and uncompromising security.”

By using alarm aggregation which merges similar alarms into one, the user interface easy to interpret. Extensive use of links in the GUI makes it easy to find the right device and provide detailed information about a high level alarm. This ability to perform complete drill-down from top level to the individual IP-Probe and Content Extractor is invaluable as a fault-finding tool. The VBC provides multiple views to make it simple to obtain system status overview, making previously unintelligible data meaningful. Error patterns are easily discovered, allowing faults to be quickly pin-pointed and corrected.

Extensive administration tools allow only specific users with the rights to configure and manage the access level of users and provide control flexibility and uncompromising security.

A powerful reports option enables automatic or custom generation of enterprise level reports that visualise system performance trends in addition to presenting vital parameters such as service availability for both management and engineering use. The reports option gives full SLA and proof-of-delivery functionality of the VBC system.