Have you given DAVIX a try? Did you manage to visualize some of your own data? What were your favorite tools? What were some of the problems you ran into? I would love to hear from you! Also make sure to fill out the survey in one of the earlier posts to let me know what kinds of topics you are interested in.
While I was working on visualizing the use-cases for my book, I had a look at a number of visualization tools. I was fairly frustrated with a number of them, which resulted in me writing my own tool: AfterGlow. To be fair, I didn’t write the tool all by myself. In fact, Christian, my then co-worker wrote most of the first version. I merely took over and added a number of features that I found I needed to visualize all of my security logs. To date, AfterGlow is still the tool I probably use most to visualize my log files.
I use AfterGlow whenever I have to generate link graphs like the one you see at the beginning of this post. AfterGlow is merely a tool which takes CSV files and generates a graph description file out of it. The following illustration shows how the process works:
If you have a CSV file as data input, you can use these instructions generate a link graph from it.
Another type of graph that I use fairly frequently is a treemap. I am sure you have seen these graphs before. One of the most famous examples is the map of the market. In computer security, I use treemaps for all kinds of purposes, for example to visualize firewall logs, to communicate the risk distribution, or to tune IDS signatures.
A great tool that can be used to generate treemaps is the implementation from the inventor, Ben Shneiderman himself. You can download the tool here. The input format is slightly more complicated than straight-forward CSV.
Have a look at these two tools and let me know how it goes. In my next blog post, I will take a quick step back and talk a little about the information visualization process.
