Abstract
Two different use cases for monitoring are analysed in this paper: the CERN video conference system – a complex ecosystem, which is being used by most HEP institutes, together with Swiss Universities through SWITCH; and the CERN Audio-Visual and Conferencing (AVC) environment – a vast Internet of Things (IoT), which includes a great variety of devices accessible via IP. Despite the differences between both use cases, a common set of techniques underpinned by IT services is discussed in order to tackle each situation.
Highlights
Video conference and Audio-Visual Conferencing services are part of the CERN IT department’s Collaboration, Devices & Applications (CDA) group
The Video conference service has more than 10.000 active users scattered around the globe and a server infrastructure that is spread across the CERN data centre in Switzerland, and various other data centers on different continents
The CERN AVC Internet of Things (IoT) is made of hundreds of devices e.g.: projectors, screens, clocks, controllers, microphones, encoders, etc. all of those bringing a variety of models and different vendors, despite attempts to keep variety as functional and minimal as possible
Summary
Video conference and Audio-Visual Conferencing services are part of the CERN IT department’s Collaboration, Devices & Applications (CDA) group. Many AV vendors are moving away from traditional AV setups using protocols, such as HDMI, SDI, HDBaseT in favour of AV over IP protocols like JPEG-2000 or H.264 By doing so, they achieve a more open and flexible infrastructure, as IP technologies bring the flexibility of IP switches in order to extend/connect more devices and the possibility for longer distances at a lower cost than when using traditional AV cabling, where extensions and long distances become rapidly unaffordable. Among all possible variants of nosql databases, Elasticsearch 2 was chosen for two reasons It offers a full stack of functionalities from data collection to visualization and it is document oriented; second, there is a central CERN IT service that provides instances of Elasticsearch. Grafana offers a great feature, the possibility to generate alarms from a given time series statistic and to connect those alerts to collaboration tools like email or Mattermost 9, an open-source Slack-like software
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