The lava lamps article struck a cord with a lot of people interested in monitoring builds, but visual monitoring goes way beyond software development. Indeed, visualization is one way to cast the abstract into concrete terms. James Turner sent in this story:

Nigh on 10 years ago, I had built an SNMP-based monitoring system in Perl that graphically displayed the status of all the routers and end-point devices in the network. I already had it sending me pages, but I felt something more forceful was needed for in-building notification. One trip to You-Do-It electronics later, I had a massive red rotating beacon light and associated X10 controller equipment. No one ever ignored a dead router again…