ATLAS Online Data Quality Monitoring

• Published in: Nuclear physics. Section B, Proceedings supplement Vol. 215; no. 1; pp. 304 - 306
• Main Authors: Cuenca Almenar, C., Corso-Radu, A., Hadavand, H., Ilchenko, Y., Kolos, S., Slagle, K., Taffard, A.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01.06.2011
• ISSN: 0920-5632; 1873-3832
• DOI: 10.1016/j.nuclphysbps.2011.04.038

Every minute of an ATLAS data taking session, the monitoring framework serves several thousands of physics events to the monitoring data analysis applications and handles millions of histogram updates coming from many different applications. This framework also executes over forty thousand advanced data quality checks for a subset of those histograms and displays those histograms together with the results of all those checks on several dozens of monitors installed in main and satellite ATLAS control rooms. The Data Quality Monitoring Display (DQMD) is the visualization tool for the automatic data quality assessment. It is the interface through which the shift crew and the experts can validate the quality of the data being recorded or processed, be warned of problems related to data quality, and identify the origin of such problems. 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 months 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.