Health Check monitor

NEW: since July 2008 most VLT/VLTI data (in particular calibration data) are transfered over the internet to the Garching archive and retrieved from there by QC Garching. In most cases the delivery delay is less than a few hours, often just a few minutes. QC Garching attempts to process the new data within one hour.

NEW: currently QC Garching is implementing the new score-based view ("QUICK-LOOK") of the Health Check monitor. In October 2008, this is operational for SINFONI and GIRAFFE. The other instruments will follow by the end of 2008.

The Health Check monitor provides information about the instrument health, as derived from the analysis of calibration data. Its intention is to provide quick quality feedback for the on-site QC process.

The Health Check process is fed by calibrations which measure key instrument components. They are taken regularly, in many cases daily. They are pipeline processed on Paranal. Their QC1 parameters are transferred to Garching and picked up by an automatic process run by the QC group. These parameters are plotted in a Health Check plot, in order to provide comparison to earlier taken values. After acquisition, new QC1 parameter values usually display on the plots within a few hours.

QC1 parameters determined by the Paranal pipelines are usually preliminary, due to various reasons. They may differ from the final values as determined by the Garching pipelines. Therefore, Paranal data points are overwritten by the final Garching QC1 values. Since 2008, this happens within a few hours, due to the speed-up in data transfer (see the above notes).

The Health Check monitor offers access to all kinds of trending plots:

• the ones with a comparison of OPSLOG data and final QC1 values for the most important and regularly measured instrument components (marked by in the horizontal navigation bar),
• the ones without OPSLOG data (marked no OPSLOG data),
• the ones which are only infrequently measured,
• the complete historical set (linked under history)
• new: the QUICK-LOOK reports with instrument scores (linked behind less ... )

You can download the QC1 parameters, and also link to the QC1 database. Most plots have a corresponding tutorial page linked as tutorial.

The Health Check Monitor is a joint effort of the Quality Control Group in Garching and of Paranal Science Operations.

The process behind the Health Check Monitor is documented here.

Find technical help and documentation here.

Note: OPSLOG files are delivered to, and evaluated by QC Garching once per hour. Whenever a new entry is detected, the corresponding Health Check plot is updated. The health of the ftp process is monitored by a litte java application:

	ftp
	parser