Stream Monitor: monitoring your audio stream

What is the Stream Monitor?

The Stream Monitor is a comprehensive monitoring tool that lets you track the health and availability of your audio streaming service in real time. The monitor checks your stream at regular intervals and automatically detects issues such as outages, silence, and quality degradation.

Stream Monitor Dashboard

The Stream Monitor is available as an add-on to your audio streaming package and is offered in three subscription tiers: Basic, Pro, and Enterprise.

Subscription Tiers

The Stream Monitor is available in three tiers, each with more features:

Basic

• Check interval: every 5 minutes
• Online/offline status detection
• Uptime statistics (24 hours, 7 days, 30 days)
• Email notifications on outages
• Incident history

Pro

All Basic features, plus:

• Check interval: every 1 minute
• Silence detection — detects when your stream is silent (configurable threshold)
• Metadata monitoring — tracks what's currently playing and detects stuck metadata
• Advanced incident types (silence, bitrate drop, stuck metadata)

Enterprise

All Pro features, plus:

• Check interval: every 30 seconds
• Multi-mount point monitoring — monitor multiple mount points (e.g., main, mobile, fallback) simultaneously
• Webhook notifications — receive real-time notifications via webhook with HMAC-SHA256 signing
• Maintenance windows — schedule times when notifications are suppressed

The Dashboard

After activation, you can find the Stream Monitor in your dashboard under Services > [Your Streaming Service] > Manage > Stream Monitor.

Status Page

The main page shows an overview of your stream:

• Current status — Online, Offline, Silent, Degraded, or Error
• Protocol — Shoutcast or Icecast
• Subscription tier — Basic, Pro, or Enterprise
• Last check — time of the most recent check
• Uptime percentages — availability over 24 hours, 7 days, and 30 days

Check History

A visual timeline shows the results of recent checks. Each check records:

• Status (online/offline/silent/degraded/error)
• Response time in milliseconds
• Bitrate (kbps)
• Audio level (dB)
• Current track (artist and title)
• Listener count
• AutoDJ status

Active Incidents

When an issue is detected, an incident appears on the dashboard. Incidents include:

• Type — offline, silence, bitrate drop, stuck metadata, AutoDJ failover, high latency
• Severity — warning or critical
• Start time and duration
• Description of the issue

You can acknowledge incidents to indicate you're aware of them.

Setting Up Notifications

Email Notifications

By default, notifications are sent to your account email address. You can customize this:

1. Go to Stream Monitor > Settings
2. Enable Notifications
3. Enter a Notification email address
4. Set the Cooldown period (default: 15 minutes) — this prevents you from being flooded with notifications

Webhook Notifications (Enterprise)

For advanced integrations, you can set up webhook notifications:

1. Go to Stream Monitor > Settings
2. Enter your Webhook URL
3. Webhooks are sent with an HMAC-SHA256 signature in the X-Maenda-Signature header

Webhook payload example:

{
  "event": "incident_created",
  "timestamp": "2025-02-25T12:00:00Z",
  "monitor": {
    "id": "mon_123",
    "serviceId": "svc_456",
    "streamUrl": "https://stream.example.nl:8000/live",
    "tier": "enterprise"
  },
  "incident": {
    "type": "offline",
    "severity": "critical",
    "description": "Stream is unreachable"
  },
  "check": {
    "status": "offline",
    "responseTimeMs": 10000,
    "bitrate": null,
    "isSilent": false,
    "nowPlaying": null
  }
}

Webhook events:

• incident_created — new incident detected
• incident_resolved — incident resolved
• check_failed — individual check failed

The webhook retries up to 3 times with increasing delay (1s, 5s, 15s) on failed delivery.

Silence Detection (Pro & Enterprise)

Silence detection recognizes when your stream is technically online but not broadcasting audio. This is essential for radio streams where silence can be a serious issue.

How It Works

The monitor analyzes 32KB of audio data from your stream and calculates:

• Byte variance — how varied the audio data is
• Shannon entropy — information content of the audio signal
• dB level — estimated sound level (RMS and peak)

Silence is detected when byte variance is below 50 AND entropy is below 5.0 bits.

Adjusting Thresholds

1. Go to Stream Monitor > Settings
2. Adjust the Silence threshold (default: -50 dB)
3. Set the Silence duration (default: 30 seconds) — how long silence must last before an incident is created

Multi-Mount Point Monitoring (Enterprise)

If your stream has multiple mount points (e.g., /live, /mobile, /fallback), you can monitor them all simultaneously.

Setup

1. Go to Stream Monitor > Settings
2. Add your Mount points as a list
3. Each mount point is checked individually
4. Incidents are tracked per mount point

Maintenance Windows (Enterprise)

Schedule periods when notifications are suppressed, for example during planned maintenance or nightly tests.

Setup

1. Go to Stream Monitor > Maintenance Windows
2. Select the day (Monday through Sunday)
3. Set the start and end hour
4. During maintenance windows, no notifications are sent, but checks continue normally

Supported Protocols

The Stream Monitor supports the two most commonly used streaming protocols:

Shoutcast

• Fully supported with ICY metadata
• Automatic listener detection via the statistics page
• AutoDJ detection

Icecast

• Fully supported with ICY metadata
• Support for multiple mount points
• Metadata parsing for now-playing information

Both protocols support:

• HTTPS/TLS connections
• Automatic redirect following
• Bitrate detection via ICY headers
• Artist and title information

Incident Types

The Stream Monitor can detect the following issues:

Uptime Statistics

The Stream Monitor automatically calculates uptime percentages:

• 24 hours — availability over the past day
• 7 days — availability over the past week
• 30 days — availability over the past month

These percentages are calculated based on the number of successful checks relative to the total number of checks. Maintenance windows are excluded from the calculation.

Frequently Asked Questions

How quickly am I notified of an outage?

This depends on your subscription tier:

• Basic: maximum 5 minutes
• Pro: maximum 1 minute
• Enterprise: maximum 30 seconds

Can I use the Stream Monitor without a streaming package?

No, the Stream Monitor is an add-on that is linked to an existing audio streaming package at Maenda Media.

What happens during a maintenance window?

Checks are still performed and recorded, but no notifications are sent. Incidents are still created for record-keeping.

How do I verify the webhook signature?

The webhook contains an X-Maenda-Signature header with the format sha256=<hex>. Calculate the HMAC-SHA256 of the request body with your secret key and compare it with the value in the header.

Can I export historical data?

Yes, via the Stream Statistics page you can export data as CSV or PDF. This includes listener counts, bandwidth, and peaks over the selected period.

Does the monitor also detect video issues?

No, the Stream Monitor is specifically designed for audio streams (Shoutcast/Icecast). Video streaming has a separate statistics panel.