Daily Image
09-04-2025
Montoring and Control
| Submitter: | Henk Mulder |
| Description: | To make sure we can monitor all the LOFAR2 hard-,soft-,firmware and alarms we started out with a Grafana instance running locally on all the LOFAR2 stations. Where team Ruby works on the back-end, and TO on the front-end work. And for watching 3 stations that was perfect, but with many more we would run out of monitors in the control room. The solution was getting a central Grafana machine, that can view all the stations and all the active alarms. But for the control part at this stage of LOFAR2 we had only used Jupyter notebooks on the station. Which meant having to run each individual piece of code on to individual station. From the beginning we wanted to go for a real monitoring and control setup with Grafana and make it a system anyone can work with it. Imagine being in the field, working on a station, and then having to search through folders and lines of Pythoncode to find where to turn OFF the power to an LBA to safely work on it. (Note, for LOFAR1 to torment our field engineers we decided to do it with putty, terminals, forwarding and lots of code lines) What you wanted was big friendly buttons, centrally accessible, that can trigger something on any LOFAR2 station.. And.. we got it working! In the picture you can see 1730 April 1st, no joke, toggle an LBA antenna to Broken, and back to Operational with Grafana. This is the whole chain from Grafana, Datasource, Central Control Rest Api, Local Station GRPC Service, TangoStationControl, to Station. So we finally PROVED it can be done! And we can make sure a badly behaving LBA or HBA can be turned off with the press of a button. |
| Copyright: | Henk Mulder, Reinder Kraaij |
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