Observing the stream: open source monitoring for video infrastructure

Before DevOps was involved, our streaming platform had no visibility into live and on-demand video workflows. Errors were caught late, incidents escalated unnoticed, and commercial monitoring tools were too expensive.

This talk presents how a DevOps engineer solved that using open source tooling: a monitoring stack built with Grafana, Prometheus, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD and extended with FFmpeg and TSDuck to capture stream health signals at the transport layer.

Attendees will learn what makes streaming observability different from typical web platforms, how the stack was designed and deployed, and the concrete outcomes: earlier error detection, real-time visibility into live streams, and replacing costly commercial tools with a maintainable open source solution.

This is a practitioner case study. Every decision was driven by a real operational problem, and every outcome and learning opportunities we had will be shared honestly.