Using widgets to monitor the LHC experiments

The complexity of the LHC experiments requires monitoring systems to verify the correct functioning of different sub-systems and to allow operators to quickly spot problems and issues that may cause loss of information and data. Due to the distributed nature of the collaborations and the different technologies involved, the information data that need to be correlated is usually spread over several databases, web pages and monitoring systems. On the other hand, although the complete set of monitorable aspects is known and fixed, the subset that each person needs to monitor is often different for each individual. Therefore, building a unique monitoring tool that suits every single collaborator becomes close to impossible. A modular approach with a set of customizable widgets, small autonomous portions of HTML and JavaScript, that can be aggregated to form private or public monitoring web pages can be a scalable and robust solution, where the information can be provided by a simple and thin set of web services. Among the different widget development toolkits available today, we have chosen the open project UWA (Unified Widget API) because of its portability to the most popular widget platforms (including iGoogle, Netvibes and Apple Dashboard). As an example, we show how this technology is currently being used to monitor parts of the CMS Computing project.