Network Operations Center Video Wall version

1.0

Last Updated Monday, June 7, 2010

 

Origin

In mid-2009 the Network Operations Center in our Waltham, MA headquarters was renovated and eight 720p video screens were added. The screens were installed to support the new room’s purpose as a centralized location for monitoring of Constant Contact’s wide range of 24x7 services. Fresh off of our Live Site Traffic project, Labs volunteered to work with the NOC team to design and construct a custom visualization that could take advantage of the screens’ massive resolution.

Development

The Video Wall application is actually composed of two pieces, only one of which is visibly apparent.

A metrics server back-end was developed in order to collate and efficiently redistribute live statistics and reporting from our data centers to various visualization applications. The metrics server runs on the same workstation as the Video Wall front-end does in the NOC, but it serves more clients than just that front-end: it’s also the stats source for all of the Live Site Traffic maps throughout the building. The metrics server lets us make just one connection to each stats reporting source in our data center, and it then rebroadcasts that information over our much faster local office LAN to the six or seven visualization clients that display it.

The metrics server is a heavily multithreaded Java application running on a quad-core Xeon. All traffic, both incoming and outgoing, is encrypted over SSL. As of this writing, it processes about 1500 events / second, and redistributes some or all of those events to ~7 local clients. (Each LAN client specifies the events and data sources it wishes to be told about.)

The Video Wall front-end was developed using Processing, both because it allowed for sharing code with the Live Site Traffic project, and because Processing supports OpenGL rendering via Sun’s JOGL libraries. OpenGL-accelerated hardware support was critical for the ability to render 4.3 million pixels per frame at a reasonable frame rate. The Video Wall application reads a configuration file at startup to learn which graphs to create, connects to the metrics server over an SSLed TCP connection to request the data for those graphs, and then renders events as they’re received.

The application presently displays Events (left side) and Latency (right side) sums for each of eight different areas of interest. All eight graphs scale themselves automatically to best fit the data received, and all share the same timeline. Presently, the graphs show the trailing three hours’ worth of data.

Demo

Here’s a quick Youtube video of the current system. You’ll see other monitoring info on the outer four displays, with the Video Wall app taking up the middle four. Please excuse the Windows taskbar and mouse pointer overlaying the display.