To make the display more understandable, observations can be displayed ordered by path, by instrument, by processing status, or by the time when the observation entered the pipeline. Certainly monitoring the status of observations as they progress through the processing pipeline is critical to understanding the state of the system. But the Observation Manager also has the capability to control the observations. Individual observations or groups of observations can be removed from the pipeline, and the datasets can be collected from the various pipeline directories and copied to a user area for further analysis. When an observation fails to process at a certain step it is usually flagged in the observation status file.
Operators can select that observation from the screen and display the observation-specific log file.
Information about the failure is normally contained in that message file, and repair action can proceed. A comparison of the two figures above will reveal some similarities in the two Motif displays. For example, each of the managers has a message display area at the bottom of the screen. This is used by the manager to report time-stamped messages to the operations staff. Those messages also go into a log file which is saved on the disk.