Stream performance

Overall stream health

There’s no point streaming if nobody is able to watch it. The Stream Performance page in the admin, at /admin/stream-health, gives you an overview of some important metrics that may give you an idea if what you’re offering your viewers is leading to a good experience.

The page charts four things: Video Segment Download, Player Network Speed, Errors and Quality Changes, and Viewer Latency.

Seeing errors, low network speeds, and excessive download times for your content may mean you need to add additional video qualities to improve the playback performance for lower bandwidth viewers, mobile networks, or other factors.

If you're seeing on this page that people are experiencing issues playing back your stream, you may wish to troubleshoot.

Note: Only some players report detailed playback metrics themselves, mostly web browsers running the Owncast web interface.

Server-observed playback metrics require Owncast v0.3.0

For players that do not self-report, such as VLC, mpv, Safari and ffmpeg, Owncast records the download speed and duration of video segments it serves, as observed by the server. This only works when Owncast serves the video itself. If your segments are hosted on S3 storage, viewers download them from there and these players are not represented in the metrics.

Hardware

Knowing how your CPU, in particular, is keeping up with the video processing tasks is important when troubleshooting. Owncast gives you a high level overview of key hardware metrics to help with this.

If you see your hardware is being over utilized, you may wish to troubleshoot.

Prometheus

For people who prefer to use external monitoring solutions, Owncast supports using Prometheus to collect a set of metrics.

You can point your Prometheus config at your Owncast instance with the endpoint of /api/admin/prometheus, using basic auth and the admin login data.

For example:

- job_name: owncast
  scrape_interval: 1m
  metrics_path: /api/admin/prometheus
  scheme: https
  basic_auth:
    username: admin
    password: my_admin_password
  static_configs:
    - targets: ["my.owncast.server"]

Exported metrics

All series are gauges, and all carry two constant labels: version (the Owncast version) and host (your configured server URL, or unknown if it isn't set).

Name	Meaning
owncast_instance_active_viewer_count	The number of current viewers.
owncast_instance_active_chat_client_count	The number of connected chat clients.
owncast_instance_total_chat_users	The total number of chat users on this Owncast instance.
owncast_instance_current_chat_message_count	The number of chat messages currently saved before cleanup.
owncast_instance_playback_error_count	Errors reported by players within the current collection window.
owncast_instance_cpu_usage	CPU usage as seen internally by Owncast.

Owncast refreshes these values every 2 minutes, so scraping more frequently than that won't give you more resolution.