The year 2020 was a special one for all of us at Agama, the COVID-19 pandemic changed our way of interacting with each other, the way of working and doing business. Looking back, we are very grateful to find our way and proud that we managed to deliver everything we promised to our customers.
As we plan and prepare for a new business year, here’s a look back at what happened in 2020. Last year we introduced a set of new features and enhancements in Agama 6.0, the latest version of our monitoring, analytics and visualization solution that has been released last April. We believe in openness, innovation and agility and version 6.0 reflects this even further.
Let’s go through the top features of Agama 6 suite.
Collaboration tools
During the last few months, remote working has become a common workplace. At Agama, we believe that online collaboration tools empower our employees to work together on projects from anywhere in the world. To meet the needs of an increasing pace of working from home and distributed teams, one of the Agama cornerstones – collaboration – is more important than ever.
Collaboration tools for quick and easy sharing of information and insights within teams using Slack or Microsoft Teams are built right into the Enterprise Platform. Agama Collaborate enables you to share and annotate screenshots and insights seamlessly in MS Teams or Slack.
Here is what you can do when you integrate with Slack and MS Teams:
- Send direct messages & screenshots from the Agama Enterprise Platform to Slack/Teams.
- Link back from Slack/Teams to Agama Enterprise Platform.
- Annotate your screenshots.
- Get an overview of active comments.
- Manage and close comments.
New head-end monitoring capabilities: IP-SDI & penalty box thumbnail view
We are now living in an era of continuous digitalization, increasing networking speed to support higher resolution video with better connectivity. Hence it is crucial to have a full visibility and control over the whole network infrastructure.
By expanding the coverage to IP-SDI, you can now have a comprehensive view over all types of head-end scenarios, with every processing step fully transparent and verifiable.
The new Penalty Box provides an immediate visual understanding of ongoing incidents for video head-end analyzers. Considered one of the smartest functionalities in the suite, the widget shows thumbnails and audio bars for impacted channels, providing quick visual confirmation and highlighting of problems.
The new head-end monitoring capabilities help you to:
- Monitor the IP layer as well as the uncompressed audio and video streams
- Detect service unavailability and packet loss, freeze frame, black screen and silence condition
- Have a comprehensive view of a selected stream via “SDI Stream Info”
- Identify the thumbnails of problematic services based on active alarms
- Get a quick visual check and highlight the problems for operations teams
Customize your dashboard with Agama widget SDK
If you are a geek or if you just want to customize your dashboard in a specific way, you are now able to build your own widgets. The Widget SDK will enable you to integrate and visualize any data source in your dashboard.
We believe that the Widget SDK is a great opportunity for collaboration between peers in the industry, in order to share experiences and even code.
Here are some of the benefits of the Widget SDK:
- Integrate graphs and widgets from third-party systems, with or without dashboard capabilities.
- Correlate and compare with Agama video data in order to make better decisions.
- Easy deployment in just two steps: drag and drop.
Single sign-on
Usually, by default, users need to log in separately on the Enterprise Platform and to each Analyzer that they would like to access. But now with Single Sign-on enabled, a user can access all the web interfaces of the whole Agama platform with only one login session. This allows for seamless navigation, for example when drilling down from platform views to other views inside an Analyzer.
What else is new?
There are many other features and capabilities that we believe will make a difference, for instance:
- New IPTV 360 Analytics add-on – providing a full insight into the delivery, device and customer dimensions, specially tailored to telco TV delivery systems. Furthermore, it provides a unique visualisation of problems in specific regions, or specific STB models or services to speed up troubleshooting and problem assessment
- An all-new dashboard builder and widget enhancements to simplify building targeted dashboards for different teams and stakeholders.
- The New Client Device Monitoring (CDM) KPI widget makes it easy to compare and correlate multiple KPIs between different subscriber devices, regions or services.
- Enhanced asset renaming for OTT enables the automated transformation of reported channels or assets names in a structured manner in the backend -translating the technical name to a human-readable
- Updated plugins for super quick integration in leading OTT players
Our team is committed to your success and we have many more exciting enhancements and new features planned for 2021 – stay tuned for more information!
About Dora Voicu
Dora leads the Marketing team at Agama. She’s developing the marketing and communication strategies, helping customers to understand the value of Agama’s offerings and the benefits for their business. She has more than 17 years of experience in the telecom & video industry.
