Health Check Monitor:
Users Guide

The Health Check Monitor has been created to provide quick feedback on the performance of the VLT/VLTI instruments. It is a core tool for daily Quality Control (QC).

The tool monitors the most relevant instrument components. It extracts QC information from the daily calibration data stream. Some of these calibrations are dedicated as Health Check calibrations, others are part of the routine calibration plan.

The Health Check system is entirely based on pipeline-processing of calibration data obtained by the VLT/VLTI instruments. The daily data stream is pipeline-processed on Paranal. The pipelines produce log files which contain QC information.

The Health Check system

• retrieves the QC information
• compares the new QC information to existing data (trending)
• evaluates the trending and creates reports (messaging).

The trending information comes in graphical form. It is published on the Health Check web site.

The Health Check system is designed such that the QC information is retrieved on-site from the pipeline-generated QC1 logs, then transferred to Garching Headquarters, where the trending plots and reports are generated. The results are available both to the PSO daytime astronomers and the Garching QC scientists.

The system is set up such that it reacts quickly to new available QC information. Currently the Paranal QC1 information is incrementally collected once per hour and transferred to Garching. The goal is to have up-to-date Health Check information within an hour. See more under "strategy".

The Health Check system is designed to provide QC information fast and in a condensed form. It is the core tool of the shared QC task. The QC data are evaluated before the headers and the pixels are transferred.

This documentation describes the basic concepts and components of the Health Check system.