Cube management system: a tangible interface for monitoring large scale systems

Abstract

Data Centers and Network Operation Centers focus on the challenge of monitoring thousands of devices. They attempt to quickly identify unusual or aberrant behavior. Once the device or problem area has been identified, it is handed off to another team for further investigation and repair. In this paper we present a monitoring system for large-scale installations which uses a tangible interface to reduce the cognitive demand on the administrators and which provides a natural mechanism for handling multiple failures and for delegating tasks among several administrators.