Online remote monitoring facilities for the ATLAS experiment

Abstract

ATLAS is one of the 4 LHC experiments which started to be operated in the collisions mode in 2010. The ATLAS apparatus itself as well as the Trigger and the DAQ system are extremely complex facilities which have been built up by the collaboration including 144 institutes from 33 countries. The effective running of the experiment is supported by a large number of experts distributed all over the world. This paper describes the online remote monitoring system which has been developed in the ATLAS Trigger and DAQ(TDAQ) community in order to support efficient participation of the experts from remote institutes in the exploitation of the experiment. The facilities provided by the remote monitoring system are ranging from the WEB based access to the general status and data quality for the ongoing data taking session to the scalable service providing real-time mirroring of the detailed monitoring data from the experimental area to the dedicated computers in the CERN public network, where this data is made available to remote users through the same set of software tools as being used in the main ATLAS control room. The remote monitoring facilities have been put in place in 2009 to support the ATLAS commissioning and have been improved in face of the first collisions runs based on the feedback which was received from the users. Now the remote monitoring system are in mature state and being actively used by the ATLAS collaboration for running the experiment.