Enterprise Network Monitoring Using Treemaps

Abstract

Treemaps may provide significant advantages over tabular data in corporate enterprise applications, due to their inherent ability to support users' integration of multiple dimensions of information. This study investigated the usability of treemaps for enterprise system administrators who monitor servers and web applications. Manipulated factors included hierarchy representation, data scale, and comparison with unsorted tables. The treemap hierarchy representations differed significantly in their support of the identification, comparison, and analysis tasks, but were significantly faster and more accurate than tabular data views. Treemap learnability was at least as successful as for tables. Performance differences between treemaps and tables increased with increasing size of datasets. Users' subjective ratings overwhelmingly supported treemaps over tabular data views. These results suggest that treemaps should be included as a standard graphical component in enterprise-level data analysis and monitoring applications.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bederson

Shneiderman

Wattenberg

(2002), “Ordered and Quantum Treemaps: Making Effective Use of 2D Space to Display Hierarchies,” ACM Transactions on Graphics 21 (4): 833–854.

Bruls

Huizing

van Wijk

(2000), “Squarified Treemaps,” in Data Visualization 2000, Proceedings of the Joint Eurographics and IEEE TCVG Symposium on Visualization, 33–42.

Chintalapani

Plaisant

Shneiderman

(2004), “Extending the Utility of Treemaps with Flexible Hierarchy,” Proceedings of International Conference on Information Visualisation, London.

Coulom

(2002), “Treemaps for Search-Tree Visualization,” The Seventh Computer Olympiad Computer-Games Workshop Proceedings, Maasfricht.

Friendly

(2002), “A Brief History of the Mosaic Display,” Journal of Computational & Graphical Systems 11 (1): 89–107.

Hartigan

J. A.

Kleiner

(1981). “Mosaics for contingency tables.” in Eddy

W. F.

(Ed.), Computer Science and Statistics: Proceedings of the 13th Symposium on the Interface. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Kobsa

(2004), “User Experiments with Tree Visualization Systems,” Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (INFOVIS '04), pp. 9–16.

Mackworth

N.H.

(1976), “Ways of recording line of sight,” in Month

Senders

(Eds.), Eye Movements and Psychological Processing, Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Shneiderman

(2004), “Treemaps for space-constrained visualization of hierarchies” http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/treemap-history/.

10.

Shneiderman

Wattenberg

(2001), “Ordered Treemap Layouts,” Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization (INFOVIS '01).

11.

Shneiderman

(1992), “Tree visualization with treemaps: A 2D space-filling approach,” ACM Transactions on Graphics, 11 (1): 92–99.

12.

Stasko

Catrambone

Guzdial

McDonald

(2000), “An evaluation of space-filling information visualization for depicting hierarchical structures,” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 53, 663–694.