What to do with a video wall

Question

At work we have a 2 X 4 24 inch monitor video wall served by a single Mac Pro with a bunch of video cards. It's an architectural feature of the office and not a particularly good way to use those nice 24 inch dells.

We mostly put a few of our websites on some screens and run gltail on some for watching traffic. Sometimes we tail -f error logs.

My question is this: what other pretty log analyzers except gltail are there? All those bouncing balls in gltail seem to slow down the rendering significantly, and it seems impossible to turn it off. What other things we can stick on there?

You'd be surprised as to how useful this thing is - yesterday we noticed that one of the three virtual servers was a lot slower than usual. It was still up and serving and because of that did not trip our monitoring, but was slow enough to warrant a restart.

Answer 1

At the newspaper where I used to work, we had a couple of large LCD screens where we did the same thing. We had Firefox page through various news sites using the Tab Slideshow add-on, and on another screen we ran a cool little Flash app that showed simple charts and stats from SiteCatalyst. You could do something similar by generating reports in web pages, and having Tab Slideshow cycle through those as well. Alternatively, you could use a single page to display system status in an easy-to-read way. Here are some other ideas from last.fm.

Answer 2

There's this really cool video of a product from NetQos that turns your network traffic into a game-like 3D animation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtC6ZM0_m8U That would be fun to show up there.

I'd use one of the monitors to display software build information from our continuous integration setup.

Answer 3

Answer 4

What other things we can stick on there?

If you have a CruiseControl server somewhere which needs to be monitored, maybe BigVisibleCruise might be of interest.

Answer 5

If you have some services to monitor Cacti can make a lot of nice graphs for you.

Answer 6

This is going to use 57-110W† per monitor all the time you have this on. That is 456-880W in electricity for all eight monitors! If you only have these on for 8 hours each working day and there are 250 working days in a year, this will be using 912,000-1,760,000 Watt Hours a year. This increases to 3,994,560-7,708,800 Watt Hours‡ if you never turn them off. At home I pay £0.1241p per kWh of electricity; at that rate keeping the eight monitors going full pelt for the whole year is going to cost £956* (1,365 USD). Isn't that a lot of money, not to mention environmental damage, to be wasting when you don't even know what you want to use it for?

My suggestion is, in the style of a James Bond villain’s lair, to fit a big map in front of the monitors that can slide out the way when you do need them.

† Source Dell support. I have not included the PC required to drive the monitors or the air conditioning required to keep it all cool.
‡ 7,708,800 Watt Hours can move you 642 miles in a Gi-Wiz
* That’s enough to buy your colleagues 435 pints of beer in a London pub.

Answer 7

Splunk is not bad, although not especially pretty. It might be a little more clearly informative than the other stuff.