Intellyx BrainBlog for New Relic, in The New Stack
As a young Information Architect in the earliest of web interactive agencies, I greedily absorbed any good examples of data visualization I could find, from the coffee-table sized Edward Tufte series of books, to novel representations of quantities and events in classic video games like Railroad Tycoon and Civilization.
Delivering a good summary view that surfaced the most relevant aspects of underlying data for users was a challenging enough job when monitors were low resolution and connectivity was low bandwidth. But the flow and quantity of data we’re grappling with today would have been unfathomable back then — not just in terms of throughput and system capacity, but from a human factors perspective. How could I expect end users to make sense of all this data?
Data visualization involves designing and engineering a human-computer interface, or metrics dashboard, to allow better human cognition and analysis of data atop live data streams and archived data.
While the concept of data visualization is quite mature by now in business and scientific analytics circles, the intuitive display of ever-expanding quantities of data still offers plenty of room for innovation in the software observability space.
Good data visualization is the critical bridge to making the near-unlimited operational and application data consumed by observability solutions understandable and actionable on the part of humans, and ultimately improve customer experience.
Beyond the IT Ops Control Center
IT Operations teams have long used “mission control” style dashboards to monitor active system events, metrics and network traffic for potential anomalies. These data visualizations could be kept on wall monitors in the IT team room, or running in a window on the engineer’s desktop.
Starting from expected Service Level Objectives (SLOs), the Ops team sets thresholds for performance issues such as flagging response times, or threat events such as DDoS attacks. Hopefully, the metrics dashboard is well-designed enough to make an incident recognizable by the engineer on-call, so they can kick off a trouble ticket.
Data visualization of system events and metrics is a wonderful thing for SecOps teams, but often leaves development and business stakeholders out of the issue remediation and continuous improvement loop.
— Read the whole story on The New Stack here: https://thenewstack.io/data-visualization-and-observability-the-critical-bridge-to-taking-action/
© 2021, Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this article. At the time of publishing, New Relic is an Intellyx customer. Image credits: New Relic (screenshots), Feature image from The New Stack via Pixabay.
