Monitoring of CERN's Data Interchange Protocol (DIP) system

CERN's Data Interchange Protocol (DIP) [1] is a publish-subscribe middleware infrastructure developed at CERN to allow lightweight communications between distinct industrial control systems (such as detector control systems or gas control systems). DIP is a rudimentary data exchange protocol with a very flat and short learning curve and a stable specification. It also lacks support for access control, smoothing or data archiving. This paper presents a mechanism which has been implemented to keep track of every single publisher or subscriber node active in the DIP infrastructure, along with the DIP name servers supporting it. Since DIP supports more than 55,000 publications, regrouping hundreds of industrial control processes, keeping track of the system activity requires advanced visualization mechanisms (e.g. connectivity maps, live historical charts) and a scalable web-based interface to render this information is essential.