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.
VizGems manages services for some of AT&T's largest enterprise customers.
A
marketing presentation
explains some of its features and business applications.
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.
