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:
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.
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.
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...
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!
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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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadhttp://techblog.netflix.com/2015/10/flux-new-approach-to-sys...
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pierre_Parrend2/publica...
(Full disclosure: I'm one of the co-author)
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.
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)