# ALICE Overwatch: Online monitoring and data quality assurance using HLT data

## TL;DR

ALICE Overwatch is an online system for real-time data quality monitoring and assurance in high-energy physics experiments, enhancing existing tools with visualization, data retrieval, and processing capabilities, and aiding future quality control development.

## Contribution

The paper introduces ALICE Overwatch, a novel online monitoring system that complements existing data quality tools with real-time visualization, data enrichment, and flexible data analysis features.

## Key findings

- Successful implementation of real-time data visualization and retrieval.
- Enhanced data quality assurance capabilities for ALICE experiment.
- Development of QC components for future LHC runs.

## Abstract

ALICE Overwatch is a project started in late 2015 to provide augmented online monitoring and data quality assurance utilizing time-stamped QA histograms produced by the ALICE High Level Trigger. The system receives the data via ZeroMQ, stores it for later review, enriches it with detector specific functionality, and visualizes it via a web application. These provided capabilities are complementary to the existing Data Quality Monitoring system. In addition to basic visualization, additional processing options are accessible to the user, including requests for data within a particular time range or reprocessing of a particular run with different processing parameters. For example, the first ten minutes of a particular run could be investigated for a transient hot trigger channel. Due to similarities between the Overwatch architecture and that which will be used for Quality Control (QC) in LHC Run 3 and beyond, Overwatch will also be utilized to develop and test various QC components during LHC Run 2. Some of the areas of QC development include a new trending and alarm framework. We report on the project's design, development, and status.