Realtime monitoring for the next generation of radiotelescopes

The forthcoming generation of radiotelescopes pose new and substantial challenges in terms of system monitoring. Information regarding environmental conditions, signal connectivity and level, processor utilisation, memory use, network traffic and even power consumption needs to be collected, displayed in realtime, and preserved in a permanent database. In this paper, we put forward the Ganglia monitoring system as a scalable, robust and efficient architecture that appears well-suited to the data collection aspect of radiotelescope monitoring, and we discuss approaches to the visual display of the streaming metric data produced by Ganglia. In particular, we present initial work in the use of 3-dimensional (3-d) multiplayer game technology for instantaneous status monitoring and enquiry, and we describe the extensions to this work required for radiotelescope monitoring.