DekTec DTC-720 Xpect - Manual (Page 4)

DTC-720 Xpect ® – 24/7 Transport Stream Monitoring
USER MANUAL
4
Introduction
1.1 General description
Xpect is a ‘24/7’ transport stream monitoring software package, which continuously checks transport
streams for compliance to TR 101 290 and compares each stream to a user-created template (defining
the expected properties of the transport stream). Any violations of the TR 101 290 rules, or mismatches
to the template, will be logged in a database and can be signalled to an NMS through SNMP traps
or as an IP/UDP based message.
Xpect also keeps logs of statistical information (e.g. bitrates, number of CC errors and scrambled
status) for the services, tables and individual components in the monitored stream. The period over
which to gather the statistical information is user-configurable and can be set from several seconds
up to multiple days/weeks.
Xpect monitors multiple transport streams simultaneously, applying different test criteria to each
stream. Each stream is independently monitored and can be paused without affecting the other
streams, for example when new test criteria are being loaded by the user. The maximum number of
streams that can be monitored in parallel is defined by the required configuration, the bit rate for each
transport stream and the resource availability of the host PC (Xpect server).
The Xpect server software is installed on a PC platform. It consists of the main Xpect ‘application’ and
a companion ‘guardian’ service. The Xpect guardian will launch and shut down Xpect gracefully to
protect its databases against corruption should a user-invoked shut-down be attempted during
database writes. Furthermore, the Xpect guardian will regularly communicate with each Xpect
‘instance’ (TS monitoring thread) to ensure they are each running properly. If an instance does not
respond within a time limit then the Xpect guardian will automatically re-initialise that instance without
interrupting the monitoring of the other instances. Once configured, each Xpect monitoring instance
is designed to run autonomously without any human supervision.
For remote control purposes Xpect provides both SNMP and SOAP interfaces. These will allow a 3
rd
party NMS, or custom-built client application, to fully configure Xpect and download captured
transport stream files as well as giving full access to the event log and statistical information databases.
Xpect provides a web interface which can be used to check the live status of the monitored stream,
access event logs and perform basic configuration tasks using a standard browser.
Finally, Xpect provides a fully configurable Multi-TS viewer (Mosaic) of decoded video, audio bars and
monitoring status. Mosaic output uses a standard PC graphics card or HD-SDI via a DTA-2152.
The Xpect software runs on a standard Windows-based PC and can be combined with almost all
DekTec hardware input devices. Using a DekTec hardware interface, you will be able to monitor
transport streams from DVB-ASI, DVB-T, DVB-S(2) and IP networks.