Monitoring

It is ideal if problems are anticipated and solved long before they impact on the radiologists work day.
The Blackbird team, with a decade's experience managing ISP's (internet service providers) has a unique advantage in applying that experience to maintain the Blackbird PACS.
In developing solutions, Blackbird software engineers were specifically tasked with adapting our technology and the lessons we had learnt to the radiology environment.
The result is an intelligent, proactive monitoring system, that solves problems long before they are clinically evident.

Blackbird Monitoring

Blackbird includes comprehensive monitoring of the network, the health of the Blackbird system and the availability of servers and services.

Network latency and packet loss

Blackbird's network latency and packet loss monitoring system allows us to detect and pinpoint network problems that cause slowness.

We also keep a historical record of the latency and packet loss.

Graphing of system state

Blackbird's graphing system monitor many different aspects of the Blackbird system and creates graphs which are used for monitoring the health of the system. The graphs are also used to monitor trends. This allows us to estimate the impact of adding a modality to the system and determine when hardware upgrades will be necessary.

Availability

Blackbird's availability monitoring system monitors the availability of the servers and services that make up the Blackbird system. Alerts are sent to our support department via e-mail and SMS in the event of any failures.

High availability

In order to avoid downtime, the Blackbird system includes duplicated PACS servers. All data is mirrored from the primary PACS server to the backup PACS server. In the even of a failure of the primary PACS server, the backup PACS server will automatically be promoted to the primary PACS server. The modalities and workstations will be able to communicate with the backup PACS server without any configuration changes.

When the primary PACS server is brought online, the backup PACS server will automatically send it all the studies that were received while the primary PACS server was down.

Power

The Blackbird PACS servers come with a UPS so that they can shut down cleanly during any power outages. They are configured to restart automatically when the power returns.