Our goal is to keep the machines registered with PlanetLab up and running PlanetLab software. As part of the hosting agreement between your site and PlanetLab, the Technical Contact has agreed to help us with local management of the machines at your site. Because we recognize that this has not always been the easiest thing to do, we're undertaking two efforts to help: Site Assistant and Monitor.

In an effort to help the Technical Contact, Site Assistant will serve as a collection of easily navigable instructions, hints and tools for diagnosing PlanetLab nodes locally and from the perspective of PLC. For initial setup and upgrades, we want to make it easy for you to get the right combination of boot media in as little time as possible.

The complementary effort to Site Assistant is Monitor, an automated service that performs the tasks of probing registered machines, checking their current health now and over time, sending emails, and responding to improvements.