At the 2025 NAB Show, proactive observability took center stage as a powerful new paradigm in video-over-IP monitoring. In a standout session presented by Adi Rozenberg, CTO of AlvaLinks, the concept of proactive observability was explored not just as a monitoring tool, but as a transformational shift for broadcast infrastructure teams seeking more control, insight, and reliability.

Why Traditional Monitoring Falls Short

For years, monitoring practices have relied heavily on passive tools that collect data from within the network or end devices. While useful in many contexts, these tools often fail to detect the root cause of issues like latency spikes, packet loss, or rerouting anomalies—especially in hybrid cloud environments and multi-CDN delivery architectures.

Proactive observability changes that. It doesn’t wait for problems to occur. Instead, it injects test packets into the network and continuously measures how those packets traverse different routes. This method reveals route instability, hop-specific problems, and performance degradation in real time.

How It Works

The approach is based on TTL-based path discovery. It starts by sending packets to a designated probe IP address, incrementing the Time To Live (TTL) value for each packet. As the packets reach each hop, ICMP “time exceeded” responses are collected. Round-trip time (RTT), latency, jitter, packet loss, and even packet reordering are calculated with precision. The goal is to uncover real behavior across paths, not just infer it from logs.

This differs dramatically from traditional observability models that rely on passively aggregated data. Proactive observability is about creating visibility where there was previously none.

Real-World Application

As broadcast operations move increasingly into complex, distributed architectures, knowing where your video packets go, and how they behave along the way, is no longer optional. Hybrid cloud workflows, multi-CDN content delivery, and tightly-timed live streams demand a level of precision and foresight that reactive tools simply can’t offer.

With proactive observability, broadcasters can:

• Detect performance degradation before viewers are impacted
• Pinpoint faulty hops in the delivery chain
• Adapt routing decisions in real time
• Build trust in dynamic IP-based distribution

Recognition from The Broadcast Bridge

The industry is taking note. The Broadcast Bridge, a respected voice in the media technology landscape, highlighted proactive observability in their BEITC 2025 conference review. They recognized it as a critical technology for the future of broadcast-grade IP video delivery.

We’re honored to have been featured, and proud to lead the charge in enabling network engineers and broadcast operations teams to see what’s really happening under the hood of their networks.

If you’re struggling with unexplained video delivery issues or are seeking to modernize your infrastructure monitoring, now is the time to shift from reactive to proactive.

📖 Read the full article on The Broadcast Bridge: BEIT Conference Sessions At NAB 2025 – Part 2

🚀 Ready to take observability to the next level? Connect with us to see how AlvaLinks can help your team gain deep visibility into video delivery performance — before issues impact your audience.

AlvaLinks | Real Observability. In Real Time.