During the last five years, Paranal has been developing a data centric paradigm for the monitoring and maintenance of the different systems in the observatory. The main objectives of this paradigm are, on the one hand, to automate as many tasks as possible to improve the dependability of the observatory while not increasing the FTE needed to operate it, and on the other, to increment the remote operation reducing the need of “in-situ” access to the system under scrutiny. In principle, the data centric approach is meant to complement and not replace the traditional problem-solving methods used at Paranal. Nevertheless, FTE-expensive tasks must be limited to exceptional situations. During all these years, we have moved from prototypes to production, and the observatory culture is slowly changing towards this data centric approach, including slow incorporation of AI/ML and NLP. Nonetheless, this is just stage one, as we are now moving to expand the scope incorporating, among other things, the cloud and creating a homogeneous, hybrid, data cyberinfrastructure.
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