Experience using an automated fault location system with a time-of-flight wall detector array

We describe the architecture of a general purpose monitoring system and give examples of its use with a 300 element detector array in a relativistic heavy ion experiment. The system has a simple and well defined interface between the detector specific parts of the system and those which are independent of any detector specific features. Tracking simple statistics on the fundamental data items (ADC and TDC values) are sufficient to diagnose the higher level components in the system. The monitoring of on‐line beam data provides a sensitive monitor of global parameters of the experiment.