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."
It sounds kind of hokey, but it probably works very well, certainly better than looking at a bunch of hex. This probably depends on what you're using to monitor your traffic. After all, the best morse code transcribers do 250 wpm.
I hate sigs.
You might be thinking of Peep http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/1 2/10/1529249&mode=nested
Just what does a slashdotting sound like?
It wasn't bad enough that my cube-mate eats cereal by the handful from the box with his mouth open, or that there are 6 cell phones and 5 desk phones in a five foot radius of where I try to concentrate on difficult computational problems.
Now there is an entire orchestra of uncomposed dissonance playing at all times that I'm responsible for listening to.
Grand.
Just Grand.
I'm imagining cannons firing and drums crashing as their site gets slashdotted.
More importantly, if your site gets slashdotted in the woods and nobody's around to hear it, does it make a noise?
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
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. "....
The server farm is playing Taps again. It's going to be a LONG weekend.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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.
Safety systems in some installations handling radioactive materials broadcast a background sequence of notes/clicks (*not* anything like a geiger counter) through loudspeakers in critical areas - the 'melody' is designed to be unobtrusive under normal conditions (your mind 'tunes it out'), but the notes change under alarm conditions or when certain monitored values start moving and even minute variations in the sound are immediately obvious to those in earshot. This has been in use for tens of years. ..and some of us just have to stare at a Nagios Web page or wait for an email that triggers a 'beep' sound.
AT&ROFLMAO
I think you misunderstood the purpose of this project.
They don't want to replace all those graphic displays with music, but they intend to use sound in addition to graphics.
If you rely purely on a graphics display you would have to hire someone who has to babysit the monitor, in case something odd starts to happen. He can't really work if he has to stop every 5 minutes and check the monitor (and there are probably "false feeling of safty" effects to be countered too, after all, checking the monitor for X weeks and nothing big popping up might make the person(s) realax too much)
With the music you don't have to check at the monitor all the time, you notice when the music changes (and can go check) but as long as it remains the same you can get some real work done.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
My network sounded like a couple of trains crashing into each other, in the middle of a field of empty rusting bathtubs, with a cold, harsh, north wind blowing at hurricane force. And that was on a good day :-)
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Demarco and Lister's Peopleware book has a good section on the importance of a quiet workspace. In a study they quote (this one from Cornell in the 1960s), researchers split a group of computer science students into two groups, the first group listened to music through headphones and the second group was in a silent room. Each group was given the same programming problem, which consisted of a series of mathematical operations, to implement from a specification. The speed and accuracy of the programming was about the same in each group, but, the assignment itself was a trick question - the end result was that the output number was the same as in the input. And, of those that realized this, the overwhelming majority came from the quiet room.
Most "technical" work uses the left side of the brain, I suppose leaving the right side of the brain free to listen to music to monitor the system. But, every so often, even in what is considered "technical" work, a person needs to be creative, and it would be unfortunate if at that point in time your right side of the brain is off monitoring the system.
Of course, if multitasking is so important, audio content is really the only content which has the potential for effective multitasking.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
By a buncha Germans calling themselves Kraftwerk. And I still can't get that damned "Autobahn" outta my head. Damn you, Ralf and Forian! Damn you to Hell!!
Real-time graphics require you to sit there watching them constantly. If this audio was not too distracting (and I suspect no matter what you would learn to tune out the normal operational sounds) you could actually hae people working on something while monitoring the network, rather then simply employing people to act like a desk security guard wathing the screens. Of course is anything sounds funny it time to have a look. I wonder if they have done any work with time-compression on this audio generation technique, so people could produce a X minute audio clip every Y minutes, could be handy to listen to a 5 minute track every day to get a quick outline of how a day went.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source