Stream health

Stream Health is a multi-faceted indicator representing the operational and performance status of a video stream within Livepeer.

1. Global Health Status is a holistic status of the stream. It can be one of the following:
   • Healthy: All health checks are in a good state.
   • Unhealthy: One or more health checks indicate a problem.
   • Idle: The stream is not currently active.
2. Health Checks are specific metrics that contribute to the global health status of the stream. They include:
   • Transcoding: Shows if video transcoding is successful and multiple stream profiles are available for playback. An unhealthy status implies only the original video is available.
   • Real-time: Indicates if the stream is transcoded faster than in real-time, meaning the latency of the transcoded video is less than the duration of the original video.
   • Multistreaming: Reflects the connection status of all configured multistream targets. It can show the following states:
     • Idle: Stream and multistreaming aren’t active.
     • Pending: The system is trying to connect to the multistream target.
     • Online: Successful connection to the multistream target.
     • Offline: There was an error connecting to the multistream target.
3. Logs provide alerts and error messages related to the streaming process. This includes notifications such as when the stream starts/stops or if there are any fatal errors during the transcoding process.
4. Session Ingest Rate is a measure of the bitrate of the video being received by Livepeer servers. It’s updated every 10 seconds. A high, stable bitrate indicates good stream quality and a reliable internet connection, while a fluctuating or low bitrate might point to potential issues with the encoder or the streamer’s internet connection.
5. Monitoring Tools allow for a detailed view with:
   • Studio: Offers a visual representation with health indicators for an active stream, including a chart showing the ingest rate.
   • REST API & SDK: Allows for querying the health information of a stream, including detailed metrics and events sent by the Livepeer video-processing services.
6. Health Metrics (from API) allows you to retrieve detailed metrics about the stream’s health. This includes:
   • Conditions: These represent specific states of stream health, such as whether the stream is active, if it’s transcoding in real-time, and if there are no errors during transcoding. Each condition provides a status, frequency, and timestamps for when the condition was last checked and when it last changed.
   • Metrics: Experimental at the time of the document, they provide specific measurements related to stream health.

By monitoring and analyzing these various options, users can ensure the optimum performance and reliability of their streams on Livepeer.