Abstract

LiveRAC is a scalable focus+context approach for monitoring computer systems and networking data that provides user-directed data reordering and details-on-demand. LiveRAC maps alarm and metric data from network devices including servers, routers and switches into a visual metaphor called accordion drawing. In accordion drawing, users interact with the display as though it were a rubber sheet tacked down at the borders. Regions of the display can be stretched and com-pressed, but the fixed borders ensure the visibility of the entire information space. Compressed regions of the display aggregate the underlying data. We implement guaranteed visibility, a mechanism for ensuring the visibility of important features such as critical alarms. LiveRAC extends existing accordion drawing techniques in two ways: it can add, remove and reorder objects to the data set in logarithmic time, and provides an infrastructure for semantic zoom, a visualization technique where an optimal data representation is selected based on the screen space available to a data cell. Using a client-server approach we allow the user to query the underly-ing data in a context-rich, visually salient metaphor while maintaining interactive frame rates.

Citations