The Usage of ROOT for Online Monitoring in the ALICE DATE System

Data Acquisition systems for HEP applications need constant monitoring (online and offline) of their data streams to accomplish several tasks: quality checking, tuning, statistics, pre-analysis. Monitoring tasks can and should use the same tools as data analysis products (conventions, libraries, environments) to reduce training, installation, development and support efforts and at the same time to strengthen the liaison between the online and the offline worlds. The ALICE DATE Data Acquisition system available today for R&D and for test beams is fully integrated with the ROOT environment. A simple DAQ-oriented approach and a more complex OO-based model have been developed to allow a variety of programming paradigms and to validate the complete life cycle of monitoring tools, both for online and offline environments.