Dashboard

Overview

The ligo-scald dashboard provides a web-based interface for visualizing and exploring realtime and historical gravitational-wave data. It serves as a dynamic monitoring tool that can display various types of data visualizations.

Features

The dashboard offers several key visualization capabilities:

  • Streaming timeseries - Real-time plots that update automatically with new data

  • Heatmap visualizations - 2D representations of data intensity over time and categories

  • Latest value displays - Current status and most recent measurements

  • Interactive plots - Zoom, pan, and explore data interactively

  • Historical data access - Query and visualize data from specific time ranges

Starting the Dashboard

Serve data locally using the dashboard:

scald serve -c /path/to/config.yml

The dashboard will be accessible at localhost:8080 by default.

Configuration

The dashboard requires a configuration file that defines:

  1. Data products - What measurements and data can be queried

  2. Plot definitions - How data should be visualized

  3. Backend connections - Database and data source configurations

  4. Page layouts - Dashboard organization and navigation

A basic configuration structure includes:

backends:
  default:
    backend: influxdb
    hostname: your-influx-host
    port: 8086
    db: your-database

pages:
  index:
    name: "Main Dashboard"
    plots:
      - plot: timeseries_plot
        schema: measurement_schema

plots:
  timeseries_plot:
    type: timeseries
    title: "Data Over Time"

schemas:
  measurement_schema:
    measurement: your_measurement
    column: data_column

HTTP API

The dashboard serves data through a REST API that can be accessed programmatically:

  • Timeseries data: /api/timeseries/<measurement>/<start>/<end>

  • Heatmap data: /api/heatmap/<measurement>/<start>/<end>

  • Latest values: /api/latest/<measurement>/<start>/<end>

  • Snapshot data: /api/snapshot/<measurement>/<start>/<end>

  • Table data: /api/table/<measurement>/<start>/<end>

Data Types

The dashboard can display various data types:

  • Numerical timeseries - Continuous measurements over time

  • Categorical data - Discrete states or classifications

  • Event data - Trigger information and alerts

  • Status information - System health and monitoring data

Real-time vs Historical

The dashboard supports two main modes:

Real-time (Online) Mode: - Automatically updates with new data - Configurable refresh intervals - Displays most recent measurements - Suitable for live monitoring

Historical Mode: - Query specific time ranges - Explore past events and trends - Compare different time periods - Generate reports and analysis