
Sonification for monitoring and debugging distributed systems - ingve
http://muratbuffalo.blogspot.com/2016/09/sonification-for-monitoring-and.html
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markbnj
The general idea of transforming a data stream into something that can be
sensed and can form impressions the way music or video does is very
interesting. Netflix has done some recent work on a tool called Flux for
visualizing their very complex system:

[http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/10/flux-new-approach-to-
sys...](http://techblog.netflix.com/2015/10/flux-new-approach-to-system-
intuition.html)

I think in general sight is going to be somewhat more useful and practical
than sound for this use case, but still a very interesting idea.

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jpalla
The second half of this paper describe a system for monitoring distributed
evolutionary computation using music instead of sound by altering existing
ones or generating new music depending of the state of the system.

[https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pierre_Parrend2/publica...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pierre_Parrend2/publication/282364079_Visual_and_Audio_Monitoring_of_Island_based_Parallel_Evolutionary_Algorithms/links/560e9bc208aec422d111cae6.pdf)

(Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-author)

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rlucas
I remember well into the 2000s having it be usual that, while wearing
headphones directly connected to the computer's onboard audio, with quiet or
no music playing, I could hear characteristic electronic noise for various
operations. In particular when printing, before any physical noise from the
printer, I could hear long bursts of quiet bleeps and bloops.

I get a little of that with fans these days; I have a processor intensive cron
job that I am reminded of when the fan across the room ticks up in speed.

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perimo
Same here. I've been searching for software that can simulate that accidental
audio system monitor ever since, but so far I haven't found anything. Maybe
I'll just have to write it myself...

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cesarb
This reminds me of the Network Auralizer
([http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html](http://peep.sourceforge.net/intro.html)).

~~~
jsilence
I always hoped that some monitoring software like nagios would pick this up as
a plugin.

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rasur
I remember being taken on a tour of one of my companies data centers in 1987
(I was a newly inducted Ops Staff on MVS systems, back then) and when walking
past an ICL mainframe, the guy showing us around pointed out a knob at the top
of the casing; told us it was the volume control for a speaker. They used it
to listen to the sound of the CPU (it was somehow wired up, I don't recall the
specifics) and could tell if it had crashed or not.

Anecdotally, this was not an unknown concept to me. As a teen learning
assembler on early 80's Z80 machines, one could literally hear the CPU fizzing
through loops, copies etc, if one listened closely enough (80's Z80's were not
fast :) )

Using sound, for monitoring of distributed systems was a hack-day project at
work a couple of years back, but sadly never went anywhere. I'd much prefer to
monitor my systems through an audible interface than a visual one, but I
wonder how much of that is connected to my having been interested in audio in
general over the years (in the capacity of audio engineering, music etc)

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_asummers
Completely unrelated to the content, but the purple link text completely
throws me off. The blue hover text just funny with the purple.

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erichocean
I can imagine this being just as—or more—reassuring than examining visual
dashboards. Hearing the "hum" of your distributed system throughout the day,
getting used to it, and knowing that everything is working okay when it sounds
"normal" is pretty sweet!

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devenson
I suppose the sounds of your hard drive thrashing about is a form
sonification.

