What if you could put your network through a live video dress rehearsal, simulating thousands of live video streams, prior to the big event, would that make you sleep better?

Employees want to treat their work networks like their home network and stream business and non-business video to their desktops and devices throughout the workday. IT departments know that video traffic can be tough to deal with on their networks due to its intensive bandwidth and latency requirements. Video can very quickly clog an enterprise network, resulting in a less than satisfactory video experience for video viewers, while at the same time slowing down other applications on the network for all users.

Knowing this, word comes down that the CEO wants to give his regular quarterly company address, but this time, instead of just broadcasting audio, he wants to webcast a live video presentation. For most network engineers this would be the start of many sleepless nights. This blog is about Hive Silent Testing. It is a product feature that most don’t get to appreciate until they get hands-on with the service. I’m going to do my best here to explain how Hive Silent Testing can help your network engineers sleep like babies again.

So, what if you could run a version of the planned live video event prior to showtime without impacting end users? And what if you could do this and get a wide range of Quality of Experience (QoE) data back from each of your sites and each individual user? That’s what Hive Silent Testing enables you to do, run a live video event without the active participation of all your users. This gives you the ability to stress-test your network in an unobtrusive and secure manner and get detailed statistics on the impact video will have on your network and the expected QoE viewers will receive.

Hive Silent Testing is a function of the Hive Streaming Service. The data that is generated by a Hive Silent Test event is fed into Hive Insights, giving you the same level of reporting as a real video event. After a Hive Silent Test you’ll get:

  • Actionable lists of top viewing sites, and sites experiencing streaming problems.
  • Overlap maps of likely viewer concentrations, and bandwidth-constrained sites
  • Interactive tools which allow you to compare the performance of viewers by location, wired vs. wireless networks, etc.
  • Quickly find computers by name or private IP address, etc.

If you have this data in advance of an event you’ll obviously have the opportunity to troubleshoot potential problem areas to ensure a successful event.  So with Hive and our Silent Testing capability, you can keep calm and have no fear because expectations will be clear.