Use IDOL Site Admin to Schedule Media Server Actions

The IDOL Site Admin user interface is an IDOL product that allows you to monitor and maintain your IDOL components from a central location. You can also use IDOL Site Admin to schedule actions in your IDOL components.

Set Up IDOL Site Admin to Monitor Media Server

The following section provides an overview of how to install and use IDOL Site Admin to monitor your Media Server systems. For more details about how to install and use IDOL Site Admin, refer to the IDOL Site Admin documentation.

To set up IDOL Site Admin

  1. Install IDOL Site Admin and its prerequisite IDOL components. For details, refer to the IDOL Site Admin Installation Guide.

  2. Start your IDOL Site Admin components, and then start the IDOL Site Admin service. You might need to perform some initial setup configuration. For details, refer to the IDOL Site Admin Installation Guide.

  3. Log on to IDOL Site Admin.

  4. On the top menu, click Settings, and then click Settings.

    The Settings page opens.

  5. In the Site Admin Application DB section, select the database type. By default, IDOL Site Admin uses an embedded database. If you want to use a PostgreSQL database, you must perform additional setup steps. In this case, refer to the IDOL Site Admin Installation Guide.

  6. Click the Service Discovery Default Lookup Path section to open it. This section enables you to set the paths on your hosts where you have IDOL components that you want to monitor, to allow IDOL Site Admin to discover services on those paths.

    Add all the paths that you use for the Media Servers that you want to use for scheduling.

  7. Click Save Changes to save your configuration changes.

After you have installed and set up IDOL Site Admin, you can register your Media Server services to add them to IDOL Site Admin control.

To monitor Media Server

  1. On each host machine that hosts a Media Server that you want to monitor and use for scheduling, install a Controller component.

    The Controller component monitors the IDOL components on a single host, and communicates with the Coordinator component, which in turn provides information to the IDOL Site Admin interface. For information about how to install Controller, refer to the IDOL Site Admin Installation Guide.

  2. Start all your Media Servers and Controller components.

  3. Log on to IDOL Site Admin.

  4. Use the Discover Hosts page to find and register your Controllers. Register all the Controllers on the hosts you want to monitor. For more information, refer to the IDOL Site Admin User Guide.

  5. Use the Discover Services page to find the installed IDOL components on each of your Controller hosts. Register all the Media Servers that you want to monitor. For more information, refer to the IDOL Site Admin User Guide.

Schedule Actions

After you have registered all your Media Servers, you can use the Monitor Scheduler page in IDOL Site Admin to add a schedule to run Media Server actions on your hosts. The scheduler sets up any ACI action to run on a regular schedule.

An IDOL Site Admin schedule runs a specified ACI action at a specified time, often with a recurrence schedule to repeat the action on a regular basis.

For more information about how to set up a schedule in IDOL Site Admin, refer to the IDOL Site Admin User Guide.

NOTE: IDOL Site Admin does not limit the duration of an individual action. For Media Server actions that run on a video stream, you might need to set a maximum duration for the action.

You can do this by setting the MaximumDuration parameter in either the video ingest engine configuration (see Ingest Video from a Stream), or as an override parameter in the ACI action (see Override Configuration Parameters).

For example:

action=process
source=/video/sourcepath
configname=myconfig
[VideoStream]MaximumDuration=4h

Setting this action in the IDOL Site Admin schedule processes the specified source file or stream with the configuration specified in the myconfig file. It overrides the value of MaximumDuration in the [VideoStream] configuration section to run the action for a maximum of four hours (where [VideoStream] is an ingest engine configuration with Type=Video).