Visualising Information from an Immensely Scalable Monitoring System

Recent research on the development of massively scalable monitoring systems has, until now, focused on the storage and retrieval of information. Most existing monitoring tools use graphs to display monitoring information, but graphs have limited scalability. In this report, we propose a scalable visualisation tool specifically aimed at visualising information from a large-scale monitoring system. General techniques and methods for visualising massive multidimensional data-sets are discussed, and then applied to the design of the visualisation. Two separate visualisations, the Node-map and the Metric-map, are developed and integrated to be used as a complete Visualisation Tool. The Visualisation Tool is then subjected to a critical evaluation, and is evaluated by two expert users. It is concluded that the Visualisation Tool successfully provides an overall view of a large fleet of computers, and facilitates the identification of problems within that fleet. The key contributors to the success of the Visualisation Tool are found to be the interaction between the Node-map and the Metric-map, and the ability to visualise historic information.