Guangzhou Station Cloud Monitoring System

1. Project Background

The new premises of Guangzhou Radio and Television Station are located at the Guangzhou International Media Harbor, one of the key projects in Guangzhou's cultural development. Additionally, the Huaguoshan premises are designated as the "Huaguoshan Ultra HD Video Industry Town." The two locations are more than 20 kilometers apart. Equipment at both the new premises and the old facility needs to be brought under unified monitoring and management. The equipment monitoring NMS covers multiple locations and equipment rooms including the 8th-floor and 9th-floor equipment rooms at the new premises, the 8th-floor satellite equipment room at the old premises, and the transmission station. Monitoring terminals need to be deployed in 4 rooms. In addition to equipment module card status monitoring, the system also involves environmental monitoring of smoke, water leakage, temperature and humidity, and security video.

Considering the workload of O&M personnel and the differences in operating environments, it is essential to establish a targeted monitoring system to provide comprehensive supervision of the aforementioned equipment, facilities, and environmental parameters, as well as daily O&M support for the entire system.

The monitoring system is responsible for inspecting equipment, collecting alarms, detecting audio and video signal metrics, and collecting environmental variables. It performs alarm filtering and alarm level redefinition on this information, displays it on a graphical interface via physical location diagrams, topology diagrams, and other views, and provides multiple notification mechanisms such as SMS alerts.

II. Challenges

After the earlier project phases, Guangzhou Radio and Television Station completed satellite signal transmission, HD program upgrade, and other projects. The systems are already running online. How to ensure safe and stable system operation with limited resources is a challenge that must be addressed. The monitoring system needs to bring different types of equipment under unified management. The equipment base is large, and equipment rooms may span different geographical areas, such as different rooms, different floors, and different buildings, which adds difficulty to unified O&M.

As equipment ages, hardware failures become increasingly frequent, posing problems for hardware security management. When a failure occurs, the inability to detect it in time can lead to serious consequences such as broadcast incidents. An SMS alarm system is needed. Once a failure is detected, the system immediately triggers an SMS to send alarm notifications to management personnel, enabling rapid fault location and reducing fault resolution time.

III. System Components

The equipment monitoring NMS of Guangzhou Station (including: 8th-floor transmission room at the old premises, 7th-floor duty room, 3rd-floor equipment room at the transmission station, Room 827 on the 8th floor at the new premises, Room 821 on the 8th floor at the new premises, 8th-floor duty room, and the Pearl River Digital playout control room on the 9th floor at the new premises) will be unified in a dedicated monitoring system. Equipment information and alarms are collected through data acquisition sensors deployed throughout the entire system and uploaded to the monitoring system server.

IV. Monitoring System Functions

1. Real-Time Equipment Alarms

Equipment status is displayed in real time. Alarms are generated immediately upon equipment anomalies, and alarm details can be viewed.

2. Topology Diagram Display

The monitoring system provides topology diagrams that associate topology nodes with physical devices, displaying the logical connections of playout system equipment. Topology nodes also support displaying device alarm information.

3. Equipment Room Diagram Display

The equipment room diagram displays the actual physical layout of devices, including equipment room diagrams, rack diagrams, and chassis diagrams across multiple levels to show the physical location of equipment. This facilitates device location during equipment room inspections and troubleshooting.

4. Post-Event Data Statistical Analysis

Target monitoring parameters can be dynamically specified during operation. A variety of monitoring charts are provided for users to intuitively understand device metrics. Logged device parameter data can be reviewed and statistically analyzed after the fact, with a flexible time window for post-event review.

5. Equipment Alarm Management

Alarm suppression methods are provided for equipment alarms, allowing unnecessary alarms to be suppressed based on actual conditions. Suppression methods include: suppressing specific alarm instances of a device; suppressing all alarms of a specific device; suppressing alarms of a specific device type.

6. SMS Alarms

(1) A full-featured SMS alarm module. The SMS sending mechanism uses a GSM modem without connecting to third-party SMS platforms or the external network, ensuring greater information security. The microservice modular design supports independent deployment and is safe and reliable.

(2) Multiple records are queryable, including SMS logs and SMS receipt records. Failed SMS delivery alerts provide immediate notification of failed messages.

V. Social Value and Economic Benefits

1. Safe Broadcasting, High-Quality Broadcasting;

The Cloud Monitoring System solution provides comprehensive detection capabilities for the diverse equipment and signals of a television station. Collected information is intelligently processed through a knowledge base and processing rules to achieve precise fault location and targeted response, laying a solid foundation for the goal of safe and high-quality broadcasting.

SMS alarms can send notifications 24 hours a day, reducing fault location time.

2. Automated System, Reduced Labor Costs;

In the context of the big background and trend of station-network convergence, the importance of safe and high-quality broadcasting of television station production and broadcasting systems is increasingly rising, and how to do it well will soon become a difficult problem. Obviously, detection and monitoring, manual monitoring is time-consuming and laborious, with high false alarm and missed alarm rates, and large time delays, making it impossible to meet the requirements of massive-scale monitoring and quantitative detection of high-quality broadcasting. Relying on the development of IT technology and network technology, using mature means of information technology such as network data collection and intelligent data processing, automatic detection and intelligent processing goals can be achieved; this will inevitably reduce labor expenditures and improve the efficiency of broadcasting departments.

3. Leveraging Data Analysis to Improve System O&M;

Supports linkage / interlock with booking, transmission, and other business systems for work-order-based alarm filtering. Provides event response mechanisms for linkage / interlock, follow, and other automation modes. Offers standard Restful APIs on which workflow automation systems can be built. In addition to collecting equipment and signal data and events for real-time processing and real-time alerting to assist operators with fault handling, the monitoring system also stores this data for future analysis. The massive historical data accumulated over time is available for post-event analysis. Applying appropriate statistical methods to analyze the collected data can maximize the value of the data and leverage its full potential.

Data analysis is the process by which an organization purposefully collects and analyzes data to turn it into actionable information. This process is a supporting process of the quality management system. Data analysis and mining built on the massive data storage of the monitoring system can improve the O&M quality and capability of departments and facilities.