What's New in Navigator 5
Navigator 5, in concert with current Blade software, provides a plethora of new features helpful in administering and diagnosing the health of the Blades in your WheatNet-IP system at a glance.
Diagnostics
The Diagnostics tab gives you three graphs which will help you understand how your system works, and how your system is working.
- Process Memory
- RX Traffic
- Clock Synchronization
The numbers on the left of each page show the current value of the item you’re looking at, and the graph shows a six-hour running trace of values. This is useful for looking back when a problem is thought to have occurred in the past few minutes or hours.
Process Memory
The Process Memory graph, available for each Blade in the system, shows the memory usage of the core Blade software for that Blade. This is a great indicator of overall Blade health, as the number will stay within the same relative range under normal operating conditions.
The percent usage indication will vary with Blade type, but we don't want to see if get over 60%. If it does, reach out to Tech Support.
RX Traffic
This graph gives an approximate indication of the volume of traffic routed to a Blade.
The number seen in the graph is roughly the sum of all the streams routed to the blade. There are streams of varying sizes within the WheatNet-IP network and you can find more information about the RX Traffic graph in this article.
Clock Synchronization
The Clock Sync graph gives you an idea of the stability of the system clock at a glance.
Large spikes and/or dips mean there was some kind of problem with the metronome (our internal clock signal). See below for an example:
Automated System Backups
Another awesome new feature of Navigator 5, in concert with up-to-date Blade software, is the automated Blade backup process.
The system can be set to backup all Blades, as well as your current crosspoint snapshot, daily without user intervention. This ensures that you always have a current full-system backup in the event you need to restore one or more Blades for some reason.
The blades also back themselves up to each other after being online for 15 minutes, and they periodically send a round of backups to each other every 6 hours. But these backups are in RAM, and if you reboot, the blade's memory is cleared until it begins to take new backups after 15 minutes. The new Auto Backup feature in Navigator 5 means there's always a daily backup on your Navigator computer if you need it.
View SLIO Status Within Navigator
Now you can see the state of SLIOs in Navigator’s LIO Info tab just as you have always been able to do with LIOs. This feature is extremely useful in troubleshooting logic setups. It requires Navigator 5 and version 4.3.80 or higher Blade software.
Custom Event Log
A WheatNet-IP system of any size generates many thousands of lines of logging, and when you’re trying to find an event in the Navigator log, it can hide amongst many other lines that are completely unrelated to the event you’re looking for. Enter the new Event Log tab.
You can tell Navigator 5 to “trap” particular types of events and display them on a separate “Event Log” tab so that you won’t have to dig through thousands of unrelated logged events.
The result is a series of Event Log entries that match the types of events you’re looking for. In this case, we’re wondering when a particular crosspoint was actually made so we’re seeing only those log entries (along with a couple of other event types we’re also interested in:
Enhanced Graphical Representation of Blade/Surface Pairings
Navigator 5 makes it easier to see the status of surfaces at a glance. Here we see that the surface with IP address ending in 86.30 has two engine Blades: A primary and a secondary. It’s currently operating on the secondary mix engine:
The connecting lines are green, meaning all is well with this surface.
Blade 240 is also a mix engine Blade, but at the moment it isn’t associated with a surface:
Its connecting line is red which is an indicator that something is probably mis-configured, there is a network issue or the surface could be disconnected or powered down.
Crosspoint Bookmarks
In the WheatNet-IP system, to make a change to a signal's logic it must be disconnected. Sometimes it’s easy to lose track of the crosspoints you must disconnect (and later re-connect) to make necessary changes to audio or logic signals, so we’ve added the ability to Bookmark a crosspoint.
Simply right-click on the crosspoint you wish to bookmark and select the “Add Bookmark” entry in the context-sensitive menu:
Now the crosspoint will be shown on the crosspoint grid with a white box surrounding it, making it very easy to find again when you need to re-connect the two signals.
There are also other useful options including “View Only Bookmarks” as you can see above.
This is just a sampling of new features available with Navigator 5. Note that most of these features require your Blades to be running v4.3.80 or above code. If you’d like to update your Blades, reach out to Wheatstone Tech Support. If you’d like to update to Navigator 5, please reach out to Wheatstone Sales or your dealer.
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