Network-Monitoring Data Put to Music 165
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."
Very cool. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, OK, it's fun... (Score:3, Insightful)
(I can imagine the dialog right now: wait, is the oboe a sign something is wrong, or is it the violin? Err...)
After a couple of weeks installing and configuring net-snmp, cacti and nagios, I seriously think music is NOT the way to go. Real-time graphics are a lot more informative and easier to understand. Music is fun, sure, but way too complex to understand.
Besides, I don't really like music entirely made by computers. And I am a Kraftwerk fan. Go figure.
Re:The idea itself definitely sounds familiar... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, since it's generally agreed that the music studios stopped listening to their customers decades ago, all that would tell you what is wrong with a bunch of their executives. And we already know what is wrong with them.
An aid, not a replacement (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:OK, OK, it's fun... (Score:5, Insightful)