Cisco OMD Director Overview

Cisco OMD Director is the primary user interface for Cisco Media Broadcaster and Cisco Media Streamer. It provides a unified interface to seamlessly manage the different components of the Cisco OMD deployment. OMD Director enables the administrator to easily provision broadcasting groups and channel lists.

This chapter describes how to log in to Cisco OMD Director, provides a high-level overview of the product, and describes the menu options that will be used to manage Media Broadcaster. Some of the OMD Director menus apply only to Media Streamer functions. This guide will not cover those menus. For more information on managing a Media Streamer deployment, see the Cisco Media Streamer User Guide.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Accessing OMD Director

The following sections describe how to access the OMD Director GUI. To access the OMD Director GUI, you must be using one of the following supported browsers:

  • Firefox version 59 or later

  • Chrome version 66 or later

OMD Director HA

OMD Director supports an Active/Standby High Availability (HA) configuration and supports inter-site redundancy. OMD Director HA provides the following:

  • Prevents the loss of any configuration data due to a hardware, software, or network failure

  • Minimizes the loss of monitoring data such as time series metrics, alarms, and notifications due to a hardware, software, or network failure

  • Makes sure alarm emails continue to be sent

  • Continues to support streaming capabilities

In an OMD Director HA configuration, your OMD Director instance can be running in either primary or backup mode. If either the OMD Director primary or backup instance loses connection or fails, the remaining OMD Director instances will transition into a detached state.

The following describes the actions you can perform depending on the mode of the OMD Director instance that you are logged into:

  • Primary: You can only make configuration changes from the primary OMD Director instance. The primary instance is the authoritative instance for all data. Changes to all configurations made from the primary OMD Director instance are replicated to the backup instance.

  • Backup: While logged into the OMD Director instance that is running in backup mode, you can only view the configuration, you cannot make any changes to the configuration. Any buttons or links that would allow configuration changes will be disabled on the backup OMD Director instance. If you are logged into the backup OMD Director instance, the title bar will show “This OMD Director is currently running in backup mode”.

  • Detached: While an OMD Director instance is running in a detached state, you can view the configuration and you can acknowledge, clear, and comment on alarms. The buttons or links for any actions that are not allowed will be disabled. If you are logged into an OMD Director instance that is running in the detached state, the title bar will show “This OMD Director is currently running in detached mode”.

If the primary OMD Director instance fails, you must manually configure the backup OMD Director instance as the new primary OMD Director instance. For more information on this procedure, see the Cisco Media Streamer and Cisco Media Broadcaster Installation and Upgrade Guide.

Log in to OMD Director

Follow these steps to log in to OMD Director:

Before you begin

If you are running OMD Director in an HA configuration, make sure you are logging into the OMD Director Primary instance if you want to make changes to the CDN configuration.


Note

If needed, OMD Director can be configured to only display Media Broadcaster menus, without the Media Streamer options. In that case, menu items will consist of Media Broadcaster, Monitor, Administration, and Support. For details on configuring your OMD Director user interface to be Media Broadcaster centric, see the Cisco Media Streamer and Cisco Media Broadcaster Installation and Upgrade Guide.

Procedure

Step 1

From a web browser, use HTTPS and enter the hostname or IP address of OMD Director and port number 8099. For example:

https://<omd_director_worker_hostname_or_ip_address>:8099

The OMD Director login page is displayed.
Step 2

Log in with your username and passphrase. If this is the first time you are logging in, enter the username and passphrase that was emailed to you by the system. You will be prompted to change your passphrase as part of your first login.

Note 
Only users with the role of Administrator will be able to access the Media Broadcaster menus.
Step 3

After you log in, the OMD Director home page appears. The home page is the CDN Edge monitor page. If you are logged into either an OMD Director node running in standalone mode or the primary OMD Director node in an HA installation, the title bar of the window should be solid and there will be no message showing the state.

Note 
If you are running an instance of OMD Director that is supporting only a Media Broadcaster deployment and not a Media Streamer deployment, the charts will indicate that there is no data to display.

If you are logged into the Backup OMD Director instance, the title bar of the window will show “This OMD Director is currently running in backup mode”.

If you are logged into an OMD Director instance that is running in the detached state, the title bar of the window will show “This OMD Director is currently running in detached mode”.

Note 
Each user can only have one active login at a time. If a user logs in with the same username from another system or browser, they will be prompted to either force the login, which will log off the current user session, or cancel the log in and log in as another user.

Logging Out of OMD Director

To log out of OMD Director:

Procedure

Step 1

Click your username in the upper-right corner of the window.
Step 2

Choose the Logout option.

OMD Director User Interface Elements

The following describes the elements within the OMD Director UI:

  • (A) Product Name: Displays the name of the product (OMD Director).

  • (B) User: Displays the user name of the currently logged in user. From this element you can logout and you can change profile settings of the current user, including the passphrase.

  • (C) About: Clicking the about link displays the current versions of the OMD Director components. This can be helpful when reporting issues or troubleshooting problems with OMD Director.

  • (D) Current Page: Displays the path of the current page.

  • (E) Navigation Panel: Provides the menus to navigate to the different functions of OMD Director. The navigation panel contains the following choices:

    • KPI Metrics

    • Monitor

    • Provisioning

    • Insights

    • Administration

    • Support

    • Media Broadcaster

  • (F) Expand Menu: Click this icon to expand the navigation panel and display it in a menu structure. To minimize the navigation panel back to icons only, click the right arrow icon that appears.

  • (G) Main Area: The information that is displayed in this area depends on what menu you choose.

OMD Director Navigation Panel: Monitor Overview

From the Monitor menu you can view Media Broadcaster server metrics and alarms. This section will provide an overview of the options available from this menu that pertain to Media Broadcaster. For more detailed information on each option, see Media Broadcaster Monitoring.

Monitor > Server Metrics

The Monitor > Server Metrics menu option launches a page that enables you to see a list of all of the physical and virtual servers used by OMD. From this list you can choose a server that will then display detailed historical server metrics about this server such as CPU utilization, Memory Utilization, Disk I/O, and other lower level server data.

Monitor > Alarms

The Monitor > Alarms menu option displays the OMD system alarms that have been raised in the Media Broadcaster and Media Streamer environment, based on thresholds that are set. From the Monitor > Alarms page you can also view alarms, configure thresholds for the alarms, and mute alarms.

OMD Director Navigation Panel: Administration

The Administration menu enables you to see and manage the users who have access to OMD Director, including their privileges in the system. From the Administration menu you can also manage the backups of the OMD databases, including adding remote backup destination. The Administration menu also enables you to display an activity log that shows both user authentication and authorization activity, and configuration activity.

For more information on managing the OMD Director users, see OMD Director Administration.

OMD Director Navigation Panel: Support

The Support menu provides the following information:

  • OMD Well Known Ports: Displays information intended for the security personnel of an organization about the ports and protocols that need to be open between devices in the environment and other systems.

  • Contact: Provides contact information for Cisco support.

  • System Status: Displays information about the connection to the Salt Master server and the Traffic Ops server, and a historical count of the different HTTP response codes that have been received by the servers since the CDN Manager microservice was started.


    Note
    The Traffic Ops server is used in a Media Streamer deployment.

    When you choose Support > System Status, the Components Health tab is displayed. This tab displays the following information for both the Salt Master and Traffic Ops servers:

    • State: The State will be either Healthy or Unhealthy. This state is based on an overall summary of the connection to the server based on a combination of the authentication status, last response code, and recent response history.

    • Authenticated: This field is True if the username and passphrase that was configured can connect to server. Otherwise this field will display False.

    • External URL: Displays the address that cache servers can use to connect to the server. This address is often the public IP address of a NAT configuration or an Openstack Floating IP address.

    • Address: Displays the Hostname or IP address, and port number that was configured for the server.

    • Last Failure: Displays the HTTP Status Response code and timestamp of the last error on the server.

    • Show Advanced: When you click Show Advanced, the contents of the JSON file is displayed. This JSON file is used to determine the values of the information that is displayed for the servers on the Components Health tab.

    • Response Code Table and Pie Chart: Display a historical count of the different HTTP response codes that the server has received since the CDN Manager microservice was started.

To refresh the information on the Components Health tab, click the Refresh button, located at the upper-right corner of the page.

If you are running OMD Director in a HA configuration, the Components Health window will also show the overall health of the Primary and Backup OMD Director instances. The following is an example:

To check the status of the individual services that run on either the Primary or the Backup, click the Show Details link. The following is an example:

OMD Director Navigation Panel: Media Broadcaster > Broadcasting Groups

The Media Broadcaster > Broadcasting Groups menu enables you to manage the Media Broadcaster broadcasting groups. From the Media Broadcaster > Broadcasting Groups menu you can:

  • View the MC-Controllers and MC-Senders that are part of the broadcasting group.

  • View, create, and edit the channel lineup of a group.

  • View, create, and edit the filtering rules for the broadcasting group

  • View and edit the advanced Multicast Controller, Multicast Sender, and Multicast Receiver (Embedded Multicast Client) settings.

Refer to Configuring Broadcasting Groups and Managing Broadcasting Groups for details on how to configure and manage Media Broadcaster broadcasting groups.

OMD Director Navigation Panel: Media Broadcaster > Insights

Choosing the Media Broadcaster > Insights menu from the navigation panel launches OMD Insights, powered by Splunk for big data analysis. This page provides deep analytics of the Media Broadcaster environment that is based on mining data from logs located on the MC-Controllers and MC-Senders. This enables OMD Insights to provide comprehensive Media Broadcaster operational analytics, including analysis of fetch times, network utilization, and the efficiency of multicast content delivery.


Note
For detailed information on the reports available from the Media Broadcaster > Insights menu, see Media Broadcaster Insights.