@4censord @sophie I remember talking to someone in the late 90s, early 00s that told me a colleague had tied in a sound generator to their company’s smtp servers, and it would play forest sounds in the background all day in the sysadmin office. I seem to recall that the amount of rain was tied to the load, and different bird calls represented different types and sizes of mail.

It was done in such a way as to be a pleasant background sound, but at the same time, when something went wrong, the sysops would hear it long before monitoring flagged it.

I suspect this system eventually died a death due to moving to a cloud provider, but it does show that monitoring can be something other than visual…

Edit: it seems I was misremembering this as a company rather than a university. It was called Peep (The Network Auralizer). The entire design and architecture was written up for USENIX: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa2000/gilfix/gilfix_html/