...back

Data Visualization - Lockheed-Martin & NASA

Orbiting some 380 miles above the earth, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has increased the observable universe 250 fold. Unlike most NASA missions, which are designed to start and end within a fairly short time, current plans call for the HST to continue sending images to earth until the year 2010. That means not only that the telescope itself must be regularly serviced; but also that the mission's ground-based control systems will have to stay in sync as they change to take advantage of new technologies over the course of the next decade. For Lockheed-Martin, the contractor responsible for co-ordinating the control systems' configuration, getting the raw configuration data was only half the battle. Managers still needed to make the information easily accessible to those with a need to know. The answer - netViz.

The Challenge - tracking hardware and software configuration at distant IT sites

"The Space Telescope Operations Control Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland is the nerve center for the entire HST mission," says Tom Wissink, the technical lead for the configuration management and support teams. "But we've also got some twenty other sites around the country that are involved in the HST mission ground system. There are several 'strings' of hardware that perform mission-critical functions, like flying the telescope, as well as other groups of computers that we maintain for testing. There's also a fair amount of redundancy built in to the system. Because of the varied demands of the mission, the ground-control IT infrastructure includes PCs, networked servers and UNIX equipment, all of which use different operating systems and a wide assortment of commercial and proprietary software."

"My group is responsible for ground control's configuration management, which in this case means making sure that everyone at all of our sites is using the same version of operating system and other software, and that we're aware of every change made to every piece of hardware and software at all of our sites. Say we decide to apply a patch or insert some custom code to an operating system. We need to be able to quickly find out which machines are using that operating system, network wide. The result is that we constantly need to know who is using a specified version of 'x' software. Because of the sheer volume of equipment, doing configuration management manually just wasn't an option. We've got 'sniffers' that can detect software and hardware, so obtaining the information isn't a problem, but we needed a way to visualize the enormous amount of data that the sniffer software generated. We found netViz to be great way to give us access to the information," says Wissink.

Using netViz as a graphical front-end to data

Using netViz, the Lockheed-Martin team made hierarchical, logical diagrams of each of the facilities that house ground-control components. The top level of the netViz project contains a bulleted list identifying each ground-control site. By double clicking on a bullet, a user can drill down from a high-level view of the facility to detailed information about hardware, software and peripherals. The graphics in the netViz diagrams are linked to an outside database, which in turn is populated by the sniffer software. With a simple diagram refresh, the netViz graphics are embedded with up-to-the-minute data. Explains Wissink, "the information is gathered automatically and put in a database. We're essentially using netViz as a graphical interface to that database. Instead of poring over database rows and columns to get information, users can go through the netViz drill downs and graphically get to just the data they need."

Future plans

As the configuration-management project progresses, Wissink plans to make greater use of netViz capabilities. "Ideally," he says, "we'd like to use netViz as a graphical interface to all of ourchange-management data. By linking our netViz diagrams to all of our software and hardware configuration data, we could trace the effect of proposed changes throughout our system. We also plan to make all of our configuration data Web-based, so that any of our IT people can open our netViz diagrams through a browser and visualize the configuration database over our Intranet."

"Our directive is to drive down the costs associated with maintaining the HST ground system. The challenge is to lower costs at the same time that the pace of technological change is increasing. By allowing us to visualize data in a distributed environment, netViz is playing a large part in helping us to fulfill our charter."