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Your account
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When you sign up for an account with Streamcheck,
you will be given a login name and password that will allow you to
access our web-based interface for viewing and managing your
result data. Once you log in to the site, you will be presented
with a screen that looks like this:
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The Status page
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By clicking on the Status tab in the top frame, you
will be taken to a page that contains a list of all your
Streamcheck tasks. A task is a schedule of individual checks
that are performed on a URL that you specify, at a given interval.
Checks are scheduled on a "just-in-time" basis in a round-robin
fashion through our global pool of Scanner machines, to
ensure that your stream quality is analyzed from many different
locations over the lifetime of the task. Here is a typical view of
the Status page, showing some tasks that have been run:
From the above picture you can see that there are 3 tasks listed.
The first one is in progress and "up" (meaning that Scanners can connect and play the stream),
the second stream has been completed, and the third is in progress and "down" (Scanners cannot
connect and play the stream.) This last stream is also configured for email notification and will
send email alerts when the stream goes up or down.
Under the "Task #" column, you will see two types of
icons: 
and  .
These indicate the type of stream being checked, either Windows
Media or Real.
The second column (Stream Name) lists the
user-defined nick-name for the URL being checked.
Since URLs are generally quite long, Streamcheck allows you to
specify a shorter name to help you remember which stream is being
monitored. If email notification is enabled on a task then an
 icon will be visible
The third column indicates the status of your tasks, whether the stream is "up" or "down", and the time
when this condition occurred:
•  Stream is currently up (set by user-defined rules)
•  Stream is currently down (set by user-defined rules)
•  Task has been completed
•  Task has been stopped
•  Task has been cancelled
The next column tells you the overall quality of your stream. The three metrics displayed are
connection success rate (CSR), average bit rate (ABR), and StreamQ™ grade. CSR indicates
the percentage of checks where Scanners were successfully able to play your stream. ABR and StreamQ™ are based
only on checks that managed to connect - failed checks are ignored for the purpose of calculating these quantities.
StreamQ™ is a proprietary metric devised by Streamcheck which gives you an accurate measurement of your overall
stream quality based on connect time, buffer time, and rebuffer time. For more information on StreamQ™
see About StreamQ.
The next column shows you information on the time profile of your streams- the overall averages for
connect time, buffer time, and re-buffer times.
The next column shows you the uptime of your tasks- the total time the stream has been "up" and
the number of "outages" that it has incurred. An outage occurs every time a stream goes "down", as
defined by you.
The final column links you to Streamcheck's in-depth reporting page for your stream:
•  Takes you to the Task Summary report.
•  Takes you to the Check Details chart and Outages report.
•  Takes you to Graphs sorted by-location and by-hour.
There are 2 other "views" available for your tasks in
this table. By clicking on either the "Current Stats" or
"Scheduling" links, you will be presented with different
columns containing other types of information about your tasks.
For information on the alternate views see Task Views.
Here is a screen shot of those same tasks shown in the Scheduling view:
Note that these tasks are contained in "task folders", much
like e-mail messages on a web-based
e-mail system also reside in folders. You can move tasks around
between folders and create/delete them. This filing
system for tasks helps you to archive your data as you see
fit.
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The Task Summary report
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Continuing on to the more detailed information, if you click on the
icon in the Results column for a task, you will be taken to a page
where you can see more statistics. The top part of the page will look
like this:
The stream URL is the actual URL that is being monitored by this
task. If the task is being run on a stream list (a list of URLs
where checks are done on each stream on a rotating basis), then
the entire list will be displayed here. If the list is too long,
only the first 10 entries are displayed and a popup window can be
launched to show the entire set of URLs. The rest of the
statistics in the tables apply to all checks that have been done for
the task.
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The Check Details report
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The second section of the results page contains a table listing
hour-by-hour statistics for the task, which can be reached either
by scrolling down or by having clicked the
icon in the results column on the Status page:
The view can be customized to display results by StreamQ™, connect
rate, or ABR range. You can also select to only see results from a
particular location, if you desire. Each of the circles represents
one hour of checking done by the task, and the number of checks in
each box are determined by the frequency rate of the task.
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The Check Details pop-up window
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By clicking on a particular circle, you can launch a pop-up window
that will contain detailed information about the checks that were
done in that hour. The pop-up window is divided into two sections.
The first section contains a listing of all the individual checks
done in that hour:
The green circles denote checks that had a
successful connect, and the red crosses denote failures. By
clicking on the associated icon for a check (
or
),
you can jump to another section of the page where further detailed
information on that check is available:
For more information on this data see Advanced Metrics.
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Traceroutes
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You can also see traceroute data for that check, if it was completed successfully:
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Outage list
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Back to the main results page, you can also see a
list of stream outages that occurred on this task (stream outages
are defined by you, according to the same rules you use to
determine up/down status for real-time email alerts). The column
for consecutive failed checks indicates how many checks in a row
failed to connect before at least one successful attempt was made,
thereby ending the outage:
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Graphs
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The final section of the page contains graphs
that were compiled for this task (this section can also be reached
by clicking on the
icon on the Status page). The graphs are divided into 3 types,
listing connect rate, stream quality (as expressed by
connect/buffer/rebuffer time), and ABR. There are 2 graphs for
each type, breaking the data down into per-location and per-hour
statistics. Here is an example of connect rate by location:
Each of the graph bars is a link to a page listing details for all of the checks done for that
hour or location.
Here is an example of ABR shown on a per-hour basis:
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