Slashdot Mirror
Network-Monitoring Data Put to Music
StrongGlad writes "Building on the idea that people are naturally attuned to sound, the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning has created software that translates network and server activity into music. And, their IT department operators can interpret the music to detect problems in the system." Talk about finding the beauty in Spam. From the article: "Last Friday, IT department operators began listening to what sounds like classical music but is actually a precise audio model of system metrics. They are trained to recognize instruments, chords, tempo and other musical elements of music as a translation of e-mail activity from 15 servers over three subnets. Every aspect of the music correlates to information. Probes detect server activity and send about 20 summaries a second to the iSIC sound engine. The data is aggregated and transformed into an audio format."
You might be thinking of Peep http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/1 2/10/1529249&mode=nested
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceed ings/lisa2000/gilfix/gilfix_html/
Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound
Michael Gilfix & Prof. Alva Couch - Tufts University
Abstract
"Activities in complex networks are often both too important to ignore and too tedious to watch. We created a network monitoring system, Peep, that replaces visual monitoring with a sonic `ecology' of natural sounds, where each kind of sound represents a specific kind of network event. This system combines network state information from multiple data sources, by mixing audio signals into a single audio stream in real time. Using Peep, one can easily detect common network problems such as high load, excessive traffic, and email spam, by comparing sounds being played with those of a normally functioning network. This allows the system administrator to concentrate on more important things while monitoring the network via peripheral hearing."
"This work was supported in part by a USENIX student software project grant. "....
I figured you'd all want to hear what it sounds like:
Listen page
How come no one else here is reminded by the system made by the Gordon Way in the book by Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's holistic Detective Agency"? There was an application he helped create called Anthem which turned financial results and various other pieces of company data into jingles and music.