10–14 Oct 2016
San Francisco Marriott Marquis
America/Los_Angeles timezone

A web-based solution to visualize operational monitoring data in the Trigger and Data Acquisition system of the ATLAS experiment at the LHC

11 Oct 2016, 15:30
1h 15m
San Francisco Marriott Marquis

San Francisco Marriott Marquis

Poster Track 1: Online Computing Posters A / Break

Speaker

Jorn Schumacher (University of Paderborn (DE))

Description

The Trigger and Data Acquisition system of the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron
Collider at CERN is composed of a large number of distributed hardware and software
components (about 3000 machines and more than 25000 applications) which, in a coordinated
manner, provide the data-taking functionality of the overall system.
During data taking runs, a huge flow of operational data is produced in order to constantly
monitor the system and allow proper detection of anomalies or misbehaviors. In the ATLAS
trigger and data acquisition system, operational data are archived and made available to
applications by the P-Beast (Persistent Back-End for the Atlas Information System of TDAQ) service,
implementing a custom time-series database.

The possibility to efficiently visualize both real-time and historical operational data is a great asset
facilitating both online identification of problems and post-mortem analysis. This paper will present
a web-based solution developed to achieve such a goal: the solution leverages the flexibility of the
P-Beast archiver to retrieve data, and exploits the versatility of the Grafana dashboard builder to offer
a very rich user experience. Additionally, particular attention will be given to the way some technical
challenges (like the efficient visualization of a huge amount of data and the integration of the P-Beast
data source in Grafana) have been faced and solved.

Primary Keyword (Mandatory) Visualization
Secondary Keyword (Optional) Databases
Tertiary Keyword (Optional) DAQ

Primary author

Jose Guillermo Panduro Vazquez (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Co-author

Jorn Schumacher (University of Paderborn (DE))

Presentation materials