This section is very important for taking advantage of Peep's representational capabilities as well as creating a pleasing sound environment for network monitoring. If you're skimming through the doc, I suggest taking the time to read this section with a little more care.
Sound representation in Peep is divided into three different categories: Events in networks are things that occur once, naturally represented by a a single peep or chirp. Network states represent ongoing network measurements by changing the type, volume, or stereo position of an ongoing background sound. Heartbeats represent the existence or frequency of occurrence of an ongoing network state by playing a sound at varying intervals, such as by changing the frequency of cricket chrips.
Peep represents discrete events by playing a single natural sound every time the event occurs, such as a bird chirp or a woodpecker's peck. The sounds used are short and staccato in nature and easily distinguishable by the listener. Also, certain network events tend to happen in couples or with a strong correlation to each other. For these sounds, you may wish to select complementary sounds, so as to better represent coupling. An example of this is the bird sounds chosen in the Peep demo. They match incoming and· outgoing email, which we noticed was often received/sent several times in single smtp session between mail servers. Another thing to note is that several different sounds can be associated with a single event. When the event occurs, the server picks one randomly. Thus, if you have sounds that sounds very similar, I suggest mapping them to the same event to give more variation and make the sound ambiance more natural.
State sounds correspond to measurements or weights describing the magnitude of something, such as the load average or the number of users on a given machine. Unlike events, which are only played when Peep is notified of them, Peep plays state information constantly and need only be signaled when state sounds should change. Peep represents a state with a continuous stream of background sounds, like a waterfall or wind. Each state is internally scaled to vary from extremely quiet to loud and obnoxious. Background sounds should be soothing while the network is functioning normally and annoying when action is necessary.
Heartbeats are sounds that occur at constant intervals, analogous to crickets chirping at night. A common folk tale is that one can tell the temperature from the frequency of cricket chirps; likewise we can represent network load as a similar function. Intermittent chirps might mean low load, while a chorus might mean high load. Heartbeats can also report results of an intermittent check (or ping) to see if a given machine, device or server is functioning properly. Note that the server does not distinguish between heartbeat events and regular events. Rather, the event is sent to the server at the appropriate interval, as chosen by the monitoring client.