Revisiting CERN Safety System Monitoring (SSM)

CERN Safety System Monitoring (SSM) is a system for monitoring state-of-health of the various access and personnel safety systems at CERN since more than three years. SSM implements monitoring of different operating systems, network equipment, storage, and special devices like PLCs, front ends, etc. It is based on the monitoring framework Zabbix, which supports alert notifications, issue escalation, reporting, distributed management, and automatic scalability. The emphasis of SSM is on the needs of maintenance and system operation, where timely and reliable feedback directly from the systems themselves is important to quickly pinpoint immediate or creeping problems. A new application of SSM is to anticipate availability problems through predictive trending that allows one to visualize and manage upcoming operational issues and infrastructure requirements. Work is underway to extend the scope of SSM to all access and safety systems managed by the access and safety team with upgrades to the monitoring methodology as well as to the visualization of results.