On land, there are two basic mechanisms for monitoring.
- daily text email: Once per day, an email is sent from each ship to parties on shore containing a summary of information about the status of the processing and data quality. A similar email goes out to ship’s tech email account.
- daily email attachment to Univ Hawaii: An separate email is sent with a collection of diagnostic information and heavily averaged sample of the last 3 days of processed ADCP data from each of the ADCP+pingtype data. The figures generated from the data are a potent diagnostic tool. The text email (above) is stored as one of the files in the collection of diagnostic files.
The entire collection of diagnostic files is available for troubleshooting for anyone with a WWW connection
Daily text email:
The text email is designed to provide enough information to determine at a glance whether everything is working or not. If there is a problem, the next step is to look at the files sent in the diagnostic collection. These files are supposed to provide sufficient information to decide what action should be taken.
The daily text email contains the following information:
time (when the email was generated)
cruise status (active? no cruise set?)
processing status (is the CODAS database recent?)
attitude devices (statistics of accurate heading devices)
- computer information
- how long has the computer been running? recently rebooted?
- NTP time server: found?
a link to the figures generated from the data
a summary of warnings and file ages
This tutorial explains the components.
Diagnostic Files
The diagnostic files attempt to provide sufficient information to tell if something is going wrong and what the problem is (or where to look for it).
This table show the file names and the categories of various files.
The most useful files are:
status_str.txt : This is the text email summary, described above.
DAS_main.txt : recent status (stop logging, start logging, etc)
- tails.txt : Contains the last 12
- timestamps and serial messages for each NMEA instrument (and ADCP log)
- times and sizes of raw logging files
- times and sizes of rbin files
- times and sizes of gbin files
- (more here)
commands_*.txt : present settings (ADCP commands, not english)
cals.txt : ongoing output of watertrack and bottomtrack calibration calculation. (more about calibration)
ashtech_gyro_pystats.txt : quality of ashtech (similar names for other devices; these files are contained in the text email)