Mental Notes:

NetMaker XA is a suite of network decision tools for tracking, reporting analyzing, planning, and designing large networks. The visualization techniques needed to scale to the data of carriers such as British Telecom.

The screen to the right shows a traditional geographic view of the North American part of their network.

The screen to the left shows a zoom of the New York City area. As you can see the usual techniques of zooming and expanding nodes does not scale. More detail can be shown but the context is lost and you can’t follow traffic across the network.

Our approach was to allow users to write queries so that they could focus on just the parts of the network that was pertinent to their task. They could then run reports on just this portion of the network. The smaller view in the screen to the right shows the results of the ad hoc query.

As shown in the screen to the left, these ad hoc queries can be combined with saved queries with specific function. The end-to-end route of traffic across the whole network could be shown. Data in these "SmartViews", as we called them (others have since used names like lenses and filters), can be dragged and dropped from one view to another to produce a very scalable visualization environment.

In addition to queries you can change and save other characteristics of a SmartView such the layout. In the screen to the right we change the geographical layout to a logical one. We call this a "Community of Interest" view where nodes are clustered according to shared traffic characteristics. By combining queries, various layouts, and dragging and dropping between SmartViews we created a very powerful as well as scalable visualization environment. Following this sequence British Telecom was able to visualize their backbone in minutes in ways they were not previously able to do.