A distributed management platform for integrated multicast monitoring

While multicast services are becoming very attractive, their large deployment and commercial use are currently slowed down partly due to the lack of integrated management solutions for the components that participate in the operation of these services at various levels. Excellent standalone components exist today and are good candidates for integration. Joined and interfaced with standard management platforms, they cover most of the functions related to multicast service monitoring. We present the resulting architecture of one integration effort which combines two multicast management tools (Mrinfo and Mtrace) for topology monitoring, pre-event testing and in-situ monitoring. The proposed architecture is used for service level monitoring and data collection.