This fictional demo of a company IT network displays a number of offices at different locations and subnets within them, all speaking to a central server through which common services are accessed. Links represent communication between machines.

The data includes the machine's IP address, details about the device within the network and the ports through which inbound and outbound data flows.

Alerts

IT network visualisations often need to identify alerts on particular machines. Alerts might be raised manually or generated from detectable behaviours such as traffic to blacklisted addresses or downtime within the network. This chart displays two alerts and uses several techniques to highlight them:

• Glyphs on nodes and links
• Automatic pan and zoom to the area
• Pings to focus attention after movement
• Contrasting colours on important nodes and links

Structure

This demo uses open combos to provide a 'semantic zoom' over the network data. Using combos lets you browse the chart at different levels of detail. For example, it is as useful to know that there is a dangerous link between the Paris and Cambridge offices as it is to know there's insecure data travelling between 10.0.203.101 and 192.168.247.168.

When nodes are combined, links connecting nodes inside the combo to nodes outside it are also combined. This reduces clutter, but sometimes it's useful to see the links between nodes directly. This demo uses the chart.combo().reveal() function to always show links with an associated alert, and to show links from the currently selected node.

Key functions used:

• chart.combo().open()
• chart.combo().reveal()
• chart.foreground()
• chart.load()
• chart.ping()
• chart.zoom()