Installation and configuration

A working knowledge of the technical basis of the Agile Live solution is beneficial before starting with this installation guide.

This guide will often point to subpages for the detailed description of steps. The major steps of this guide are:

1. Hardware and operating system requirements
2. Install, configure and start the System Controller
3. The base platform components
   1. Install prerequisites
   2. Preparing the base system for installation
   3. Install Agile Live platform
   4. Configure and start the Agile Live components
4. Install the configuration-and-monitoring GUI (optional)
5. Install Prometheus and Grafana, and configure them (optional)
6. Install and start control panel GUI examples

1. Hardware and operating system requirements

The bulk of the platform runs on computer systems based on x86 CPUs and running the Ubuntu 22.04 operating system. This includes the following software components: the ingest, the production pipeline, the control panel integrations, and the system controller. The remaining components, i.e. the configuration and monitoring GUI, the control panel GUI examples, and the Prometheus database and Grafana frontend can be run in the platform of choice, as they are cross platform.

The platform does not have explicit hardware performance requirements, as it will utilize the performance of the system it is given, but suggestions for hardware specifications can be found here.

Agile Live is supported and tested on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Other versions may work but are not officially supported.

2. Install, configure and start the System Controller

The System Controller is the central backend that ties together and controls the different components of the base platform, and that provides the REST API that is used by the user to configure and monitor the system. When each Agile Live component, such as an Ingest or a Production Pipeline, starts up it connects to and registers with the System Controller, so it is a good idea to install and configure the System Controller first.

Instructuctions on how to install and configure it can be found here.

3. The base platform components

The base platform consists of the software components Ingests, Production Pipelines, and Control Panel interfaces. Each machine that is intended to act as an aquisition device for media shall run exactly one instance of the Ingest application, as it is responsible for interfacing with third party software such as SDKs for SDI cards and NDI.

The production pipeline application instance (interchangably called a rendering engine application instance in parts of this documentation) uses the resources of its host machine in a non-exclusive way (including the GPU), so there may therefore reside more than one instance on a single host machine.

The control panel integrations preferably reside on a machine close to the actual control panel.

However, in a very minimal system not all of these machines need to be separate; in fact, all the above could run on a single computer if so is desired.

A guide to installing and configuring the Agile Live base platform can be found here.

4. Install the configuration-and-monitoring GUI (optional)

There is a basic configuration-and-monitoring GUI that is intended to be used as an easy way to get going with using the system. It uses the REST API to configure and monitor the system.

Instructions for how to install it can be found here and a tutorial for how to use it can be found here

5. Install Prometheus and Grafana, and configure them (optional)

To collect useful system metrics for stability and performance monitoring, we advise to use Prometheus. For visualizing the metrics collected by Prometheus you could use Grafana.

The System controller receives a lot of internal metrics from the Agile Live components. These can be pulled by a Prometheus instance from the endpoint https://system-controller-host:port/metrics.

It is also possible to install external exporters for various hardware and OS metrics.

To install and run prometheus exporters on the servers that run ingest and production pipeline software, as well as installing, configuring and running the Prometheus database and the associated Grafana instance on the server dedicated to management and orchestration, follow this guide.

6. Install and start control panel GUI examples

To install the example control panel GUIs that are delivered as source code, follow this guide.