Setting up a Scheduled Myriad Task to replicate content with Myriad Cloud or a remote location.

Modified on Tue, 24 Sep at 12:55 PM

Introduction

Myriad Playout v6.4 introduces the new Myriad Task system which allows you to setup a wide variety of different tasks, one of which is the new Replication Task.

The Replication Task allows you to easily setup regular fully automatic replication with a remote system using a simple user interface to select what content you want to replicate and how often. You can even add multiple Tasks, each with different settings, for example, you might want to:

Set different replication intervals for different parts of your system - for example, you might want to only replicate new songs overnight, whilst voice links and commercials need to be replicated within 20 minutes of being added to your system,
Have different areas replicate in different directions - perhaps the majority of your content needs to be "download only" from a remote system, but one specific area of your local MediaWall is to be "upload only" to allow a remote studio to contribute content to a central operations hub.

Before Myriad Tasks, setting up replication to keep your content in sync with a Myriad Cloud or other remote system was very complex, but the new Myriad Tasks system is incredibly easy to configure, making it much easier to keep multiple sites in sync, as well as supporting Myriad Cloud Hybrid and Myriad Cloud Disaster recovery scenarios.

Getting started

Before starting this process, you should have followed the instructions in this article to ensure that you have correctly tested that replication is configured and works on your system.

Note: You can ignore the final section in older versions of that article ("Automated Replication Processes") as this new process replaces that older command-line based solution.

Make sure you have downloaded and installed Myriad Playout v6.4.1 and/or Myriad Schedule v6.4.1 or higher. This software is required to configure your Myriad Tasks.
Make sure you have downloaded and installed the Myriad Management Service v6.4.1 or higher. This software runs the Scheduled Myriad Tasks leaving Myriad Playout free to concentrate on playout out your station. The Management Service must usually be installed on the same computer that is used to store your Myriad data and your Microsoft SQL Server databases.
Open Myriad Playout or the Myriad Schedule application and on the Settings menu choose Scheduled Myriad Tasks to open the Edit Scheduled Myriad Tasks Window:
On the Edit Scheduled Myriad Tasks window, click the Add Task button in the top right-hand corner and select "Replication" to create a new Replication Task:
You will recognise much of the Edit Task window that has opened as it is very similar to the window used to manually replicate items with a remote station, but with several additional fields.
Make sure that Enabled is switched on and enter a suitable Title, then from the Task Parameters section, select the information that you want to replicate.

In this example, we have selected to "Download Only" "Media Items" in the range 10,000 to 99,999:
Click on the Schedule tab to select how often you want the Replication to run. There are many possible options allowing you to choose from every few seconds up to only once a month. You can also create much more complex schedule patterns by using the "Cron Expression" option at the bottom, but that is outside the scope of this help article.

In our example below, we have selected to run weekday at 11pm, and this is confirmed in the Summary view at the top of the window:
Click OK to save the task and return to the Edit Scheduled Tasks window, where the new task will be shown. We can see from this screenshot that the task has been created and is ready to run at the scheduled time:

Monitoring your tasks

You can see the status of each Task in the right hand Status column of the Edit Scheduled Myriad Tasks window, and if there have been any problems with running a task then a brief summary of the issue will be displayed here.

Tip: If you want to find more information about any problems with a Scheduled Task then check the User History as this will show more detailed information.

Click the Refresh button in the bottom right hand corner of the window to refresh the information.

Myriad Monitor application

The Myriad Management Service installer also installs a lightweight monitoring display application called the Myriad Monitor that connects to the Myriad Management Service and shows a status display at the bottom of the window. We can see from this screenshot that our Myriad Task is ready to run.

This display automatically updates every few seconds, and can be left on screen permanently, or only opened when you want to see the status of your system:

In our screenshot above, we can see we have also turned on the option in the Myriad Settings (see below) application to allow Myriad Monitor to manually trigger a task to run immediately by clicking the small "play" button in the right hand column.

Clicking this will start the task running straight away, and we can see the "Last Started" information and "Last Status" columns have updated:

And once it has completed then the "Last Completed" column has also been updated:

Myriad Settings Application

Another application that is installed along with the Myriad Management Service is the Myriad Settings application. This is used to configure the Myriad Management Service as well as other parts of your Myriad system, including being able to edit your Scheduled Myriad Tasks.

Because the Settings application is a very powerful application, it requires Windows "Administrative" privileges to run it, so this prevents non-administrator users from being able to alter settings.

Once you start the application you will see the main window which contains several key options including entering your Playout license, altering the file locations, configuring your Myriad Management Service and much more.

To configure Myriad Tasks and the Management Service itself, we are primarily interested in the 2 buttons highlighted below:

Clicking the Scheduled Myriad Tasks will ask you to login with your Myriad User credentials and then opens the same window you have seen above - unlike most of the options in the Settings application, you need to login as some of the Tasks require a logged in user so it can offer the correct options.

The Management Service Settings button opens the Management Service Settings window.

Turn on the "Allow Tasks to be manually started.... " option to allow the Monitor application to start Tasks manually, and click OK to save the settings:

You will then need to restart the Management Service itself from the Management Service menu at the top of the window for this change to take effect.

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