By Ruth Arias
Are you new to Media Monitors? Don't worry, we are here to help you get started. It can be intimidating starting a new software program, but we promise it is easy. This is one of the most common calls we receive, so in my column I will review the steps to installing our media player.
Q: My IT person has installed the Media Monitors Client Audio from www.mediamonitors.com/install, but when I try to play back media, I get the message "a required software component is not installed."
A: You are most likely getting that message because you are using Internet Explorer 8 or 9, and Microsoft has increased security levels on these browser versions. Some security adjustments must be made for Media Monitors media playback, Excel export and print functions to work properly. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
Once properly installed you will click the speaker icon, and hear the creative you selected.
Media Monitors offers free one-on-one or small group training sessions for new or existing client companies. Please
contact us today to set a time to get personally trained on these important advertising analysis tools from Media Monitors.
By John Fulbright
KEEPING MEDIA MONITORS ON THE AIR
"Hope for the best and prepare for the worst" - Thomas Norton, English poet and politician (1532-1584)
It's only a disaster if you aren't prepared and since our data is the backbone of our product we've taken deliberate measures to ensure high availability of our product as well as being able to recover from catastrophic failure.
High Availability deals with the uptime of our main servers and database in order to deliver uninterrupted service. The ability to recover from catastrophic failure is called, wait for it... Disaster Recovery.
Let's first look at High Availability.
We are one of a few companies with a database that has no moving parts. Our main database servers have a complete solid-state hard drive system, which means less chance of mechanical failure. Our hard drives also have four levels of redundancy built into them.
We have multiple mirrored databases so that we can switch to a different, in-sync database at a moment's notice. This also allows us to do maintenance on one database server while another remains in operation. (Windows updates, anyone?)
We have backup generators and uninterrupted power supplies on all systems, and additionally, backup power supplies on our main database servers and hard drives.
Even though there are many automated checks and notifications set up, the entire system is also monitored 24/7 by actual human beings, so we can detect problems and respond quickly.
We have a data backup plan that saves data to local and offsite locations. We test our database backups and data restoration procedures on a weekly basis.
This leads us to our Disaster Recovery plan.
The aforementioned backup plan ensures that we have data no more than an hour old if we need to go into a disaster recovery mode.
Hourly syncs of data go to a redundant system that is separate from the main system. The main system could melt into a pile of slag and we'd be able to switch to a system that is no more than an hour old so that we could continue to deliver our product. If both of those systems became unavailable we'd still be able to use our offsite backup to get a new system up and running in a short amount of time.
Finally, we performed our yearly Disaster Recovery drill mid-July which went perfectly. (On the weekend, BTW, in case it didn't) We are fully confident in our high-availability and disaster recovery capabilities if we were to face anything shy of the Zombie Apocalypse!
