CERN Accelerating science

ATLAS Slides
Report number	ATL-DAQ-SLIDE-2010-078
Title	ATLAS online data quality monitoring
Author(s)	Cuenca Almenar, C (Yale)
Corporate author(s)	The ATLAS collaboration
Submitted to	12th Topical Seminar on Innovative Particle and Radiation Detectors, Sienna, Italy, 7-10 Jun 2010
Submitted by	[email protected] on 21 May 2010
Subject category	Detectors and Experimental Techniques
Accelerator/Facility, Experiment	CERN LHC ; ATLAS
Abstract	With the delivery of the first proton-proton collisions by the LHC, the ATLAS collaboration had the opportunity to operate the detector under the environment it was designed for. These first events have been of great interest not only for the high energy physics outcome, but also as a means to perform a general commissioning of system. A highly scalable distributed monitoring framework assesses the quality of the data and the operational conditions of the detector, trigger and data acquisition system. Every minute of an ATLAS data taking session the monitoring framework serves several thousands physics events to monitoring data analysis applications, handles millions of histogram updates coming from thousands applications, executes over forty thousand advanced data quality checks for a subset of those histograms, displays histograms and results of these checks on several dozens of monitors installed in main and satellite ATLAS control rooms. The online data quality monitoring system has been of great help in providing quick feedback to the subsystems about the functioning and performance of the different parts of ATLAS by providing a configurable easy and fast visualization of all this information. The Data Quality Monitoring Display (DQMD) is a visualization tool for the automatic data quality assessment of the ATLAS experiment. It is the interface through which the shift crew and experts can validate the quality of the data b eing recorded or processed, be warned of problems related to data quality, and identify the origin of such problems. The display is designed to work both online within the trigger and data acquisition (tdaq) environment, offline at the various tiers for processing of data, or privately by experts. This tool allows great flexibility for visualization of histograms, with an overlay of reference histograms when applicable, configurations used for automatic checking of those histograms, and the results. The display configuration is stored in a database, that can be easily created and edited with the Data Quality Monitoring Configurator (DQMC) tool. The first weeks of collisions data taking turned into a very successful experience for the monitoring framework and translated into several improvements to easy usability and efficient information transfer. A description of the design and implementation of the DQMD and DQMC will be presented, as well as the performance of the monitoring framework during the first ATLAS run and the recent upgrades concerning alarm handling and parameters finding.