Video Transcript
Monitoring Third-Party Devices with Enterprise Manager
6m 58s
00:08
You've undoubtedly heard by now that Q-SYS Reflect Enterprise Manager allows you to remotely monitor and manage your Q-SYS system.
00:15
But what you might not realize is that Enterprise Manager not only monitors native Q-SYS and peripherals, but also third party devices.
00:23
Enterprise manager can monitor projectors, lighting consules, displays, window shade controllers, you name it.
00:29
As long as they are properly configured to do so in your Q-SYS design.
00:33
If you've been integrating these device types into your Q-SYS designs already, you know that this happens in one of two ways, either through a plugin or a custom script.
00:44
Using an enterprise manager enabled Q-SYS plugin is the easiest and fastest route to get Q-SYS to communicate with a third party device and to get enterprise manager to monitor it.
00:54
If you visit the Q-SYS library, you'll find amongst other things, a growing library of control plugins available, which let you connect and control devices with no additional scripting experience required.
01:06
Be sure to look for plugins with the Reflect enabled tag, which are specifically designed to interact with Q-SYS Reflect.
01:14
All you need to do is log in and then check out the plugin you want to add to your library.
01:20
Then back in Q-SYS designer, login here as well and visit the assets installer.
01:28
This will install items from your library onto your local pc, which will then populate in your plugins folder.
01:36
Once you've added them to your schematic, be sure to go to its properties and select is managed, which migrates the plugin to your inventory and allows it to be monitored by Q-SYS Reflect.
01:47
You might also want to change the default name so you can more easily identify it in Reflect now.
01:53
All of that device's status data will be visible in the system inventory and event log sections of Reflect along with rich data from all your other Q-SYS native devices.
02:03
No other programming is required.
02:05
It doesn't get much easier than that.
02:08
But realistically, there are far more devices in the world than we could ever write plugins for.
02:13
In this case, you or your programmer are probably writing custom LUA scripts using the Q-SYS scripting engine to send and receive information to and from a third party peripheral.
02:22
We have an entire curriculum on control training that can help you script those interactions.
02:27
So we won't get into that right now.
02:29
The question is, how can you get your custom script that's controlling a third party device to also send status updates and event logs to enterprise manager?
02:39
The answer is this, the monitoring proxy components.
02:43
This component can represent any third party device that's connected to your Q-SYS core and deliver its information to the enterprise manager.
02:51
You'll find it in your inventory under the peripherals tab.
02:55
Let's add a monitoring proxy into the schematic.
02:58
You'll notice there are several fields that you have to complete in order for it to function, such as manufacturer and model.
03:05
You should also give your device a suitable name to identify it.
03:10
As well as select what type of device it is.
03:14
If none of these type categories are appropriate, you can select other and specify its type here, all of this information, name a manufacturer, model, and type.
03:25
They'll help you organize and sort through your devices within enterprise manager.
03:30
The component has a single input pin, which is a status input to receive the data from your LUA scripting component or block controller.
03:38
The status information sent from your script will display here in the pro's status field, which is what gets delivered to the enterprise manager.
03:47
But if you are not up to speed on these tools yet, don't worry.
03:51
You can still perform some basic monitoring without any custom scripting.
03:55
After all, for most third party devices, the critical thing you need to know is simply whether or not there's a valid connection between that device and your Q-SYS core processor.
04:04
If there is, then your script is probably functioning fine, but if the core can't communicate with that device well then that's a failure that you need to know about.
04:13
An easy way to check if the core can communicate with a device is simply to ping it.
04:18
You might be familiar with sending a ping command from a Windows command prompt, which is a very basic test of whether a particular IP address can receive data from your source device.
04:29
Your PC is querying the network for a response from a specific location.
04:35
You might also know the word in regards to submarine sonar, in which you send a ping out into the world to see if there's anything out there that will Reflect it back to you.
04:45
This is the same idea, but you don't want to ping your third party device from your pc.
04:50
You wanna ping it from your core.
04:52
You can do this using the ping components.
04:55
Go over to the monitor components branch of your schematic elements library, and drag the ping components into your design in its control panel.
05:05
All you need is the IP address of the destination device.
05:09
Once you start the ping, it will send out a test packet once every interval.
05:14
If the device acknowledges the test packets, then you know your connection between the device and your core is good.
05:20
If not, then something's wrong.
05:22
Maybe the network switch between those devices is down or not configured properly.
05:27
Maybe your device is unplugged.
05:29
Either way, that's exactly the kind of information you wanna know about when managing a system remotely using enterprise manager.
05:36
To make this happen, we simply need to expose the status control pin of this ping components and wire it to our monitoring proxy status inputs.
05:46
That's it.
05:47
If you switch over to enterprise manager, you'll now get confirmation that this device has a healthy connection to the core.
05:54
If I were to yank the power cable on our device, well then the ping will fail.
06:00
Send that information to the monitoring proxy and notify us in enterprise manager.
06:05
One more thing.
06:06
You may have noticed some log entry controls in the Monitoring Proxies Control panel.
06:12
These allow you to publish custom messages to your cores event log, as well as decide at which severity level it should be categorized.
06:19
While you can decide these manually, most people would control these from their LUA script or block controller based on their interactions with the device.
06:27
For instance, you could use this to report your projector's lamp temperature, or which source is currently selected on a video switch.
06:36
This is useful information for your event log, and when using the monitoring proxy, those additional events are synchronized up to the enterprise managers event log and that's it.
06:48
The Monitoring proxy is a simple to use tool for monitoring third party devices in Enterprise Manager.
06:54
Thanks for watching.
Lesson Description
Monitoring Third-Party Devices with Enterprise Manager
6m 58s
This section will teach you how to use the Enterprise Manager to monitor third-party devices using the Monitoring Proxy component. Learn how to get your custom script that’s controlling a third party device to send Status updates and Eventlogs to Enterprise Manager.
Downloads and Links
Monitoring Third-Party Devices with Enterprise Manager
6m 58s