If you have ever been involved in online radio, the likelyhood is that you will have (and probably still are!) using Shoutcast or Icecast servers to stream your live audio to the masses. Shoutcast and Icecast are, after all, THE preferred and most widely used streaming platform out there.

After a few questions regarding monitoring the status of Shoutcast or Icecast servers, I decided to look into what can be done to keep your eye on your server and monitor its status.

After discussing with a few radio station operators, a solution was introduced which would give the following features:

– Notification by email and/or SMS text message on status change (online/offline).
– Monitoring of Shoutcast server status (Server online).
– Monitoring of audio source (Server online, but no source connected).

These features allow for one (or more) people to be notified if the actual Shoutcast or Icecast server is down, but also alerts the station if the audio playout system goes down, so the server is online, but there is no audio source connected (plyout or DJ failure). Either of these occurences will mean that listeners will get no audio if they try and tune in.

Both services (server and playout) are monitored by a remote server (not the same as which either the Shoutcast or Icecast server OR the playout are on) at a preset interval (every 5 minutes by default) and if the status of the server or playout changes, an email and or SMS text message will be sent out to the intended recipients to inform them of the situation.

If and when the status recovers (server comes back online and/or the audio source is reconnected) a further notification is send out via the same methed (email and/or SMS text) to inform that the fault situation has cleared.

There is more information about this work here.