Visual Discovery - VizGems

Eleftherios Koutsofios, Russ Truscott, Ross Joswick

Many Internet services run on complex configurations of computer systems and networks. Information Visualization Research created the technology that underlies VizGems, a tool that gives customers and operations staff end-to-end views of AT&T's web hosting, VoIP and other services. Some of its key attributes are:

• Shows customer impacts of events.
• Allows visual querying and drill-down.
• Uses standard web clients.
• Views are generated on the fly from data and metadata.
• Integrates realtime information with historical logs.
• Data manager scales to over 400,000,000 events in a single view.
• AT&T vcodex compression can store years' worth of raw data, for problems like life cycle analysis.

In 2006-8, Peter McLachlan and Tamara Munzner from the University of British Columbia adapted LiveRAC (Live Reconfigurable Accordion Drawing) to semantic zooming of large statistical arrays in a convenient, high-interaction interface for VizGems. VizGems also led to an ongoing collaboration with the Software Systems Research and Statistics Research departments in the detection, prediction and avoidance of failures based on the analysis of anomalies in data streams.

Another visualization platform from our group, YOIX, runs the graphical interface to AT&'s Global Fraud Management System, on top of the world's largest publicly known transactional database.