title: Monitoring the digital preservation process
creators: Siarhei Kulakou
abstract: The National Library of Norway needed a simple way to visualize how the digital collection continuously grows. Additionally, there was a need to monitor the flow of data at all times. 
  
  We chose to use Grafana as the monitoring tool for this purpose. Grafana is open source and is a web application that can run on multiple platforms. It provides business insights and interactive visualization of statistics. It allows displaying charts, graphs, and alerts on a website connected to supported data sources. 
  
  We chose to use Grafana for the following purposes: 
  
  Statistics showing the inventory for preservation. Here, we can display the growth in the number of archival packages, number of files, and data volume. This can then be differentiated by media type (text, moving images, audio, images, and web archives). Within each media type, we can further differentiate by subtypes. This has proven to be very useful and is a simple way to demonstrate what is preserved digitally in the National Library. 
  
  Monitoring of throughput. Here, we create graphs that show the flow of data from submission to finished preserved archival package for multiple production lines. This enables us to see bottlenecks and queues that may arise in the ongoing production. This allows us to quickly assess the "health" of the system and take action before the problem becomes too large.
keywords: information technology for dp start 2 preserve