Few month ago I showcased how a single server of Voldemort key-value store sounds.  Sonification is a valid way to monitor systems, and has been used a lot in real applications. Geiger counter would be one of the most well-known examples of a sonified application. In some cases sonification may be the preferred form of representing information, as other forms surprisingly may not work as well for human perception. Even visualization of information is often not as good as sonification. Take the same Geiger counter example; research has shown that visual radiation level monitors do not perform quite as well as the sound ones as people tend to be distracted from the display to perform other tasks. Even visual and audio hybrids do not alert users of high radiation levels as good as simple audio counter.

As an example of a hybrid audio-visual system for Voldemort, I have built a small “traffic-light monitor” that changes colors and beeps differently depending on what action is performed by the server. The rig is built with Arduino and simply plugs to the USB of the machine running Voldemort server. Below is a short video of how it operates:

The green light lights up when server handles a “get” operation. Yellow light is for “put” requests and red light is for “get version” commands. As can be see, writing to Voldemort requires two operations, “get version” and “put” and they happen so quickly that Arduino is barely capable to light up the LEDs.

P.S. “Traffic light monitor” is not to be taken seriously, it is rather a silly example to show that there are plenty of ways to monitor a system or represent system’s logs.