Wonderful, I will be able to use this in an upcoming project. Thank you. :)
Cubism.js: time series visualization
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#22This is interesting, I do want to ask though why you went with stacked graphs as opposed to overlaid line graphs. This makes sense when comparing disparate data points (Load vs Memory vs HTTP Requests), but are you doing this with similar data points as well? The full screen demo is really what triggered the question for me. I've got a bunch of servers that we monitor and have found that a single graph that shows loa…
We use it for both, but most commonly we use it to compare a single metric (such as CPU or network utilization) across hosts. Line graphs work well when you only have a few hosts, but start to suffer when you try to plot many hosts simultaneously. Depending on how noisy your metrics are, line graphs are good for showing the envelope, but are less effective at revealing when one or two hosts are behaving oddly; the an…
Thanks for the insight. I hadn't seen horizon graphs previously, they're interesting and a great way to compact data and in a way that maintains readability.
Regarding line graphs, there is some visibility loss by having a a single line graph show a ton of servers. I tend to think that deviations that are worth noting tend to stick out. That isn't always going to be the case I suppose, but nothing is 100%.
I'm just not sure how this scales if I've got 100 servers with 2-3 metrics each that I'm tracking. Perhaps this is better for more of a detailed view than a dashboard where where more density is needed. They're certainly more readable then what we use today.
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#23never heard of horizon charts before, and found it amazing. http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/horizon/
If by "amazing" means "I need an explanation to see what I'm seeing", then I agree with you. Analytics visualizations are great when they're pretty, but if they aren't comprehensible, you've failed. In the vast (>1) user testing I've done with horizon graphs, it just isn't grokkable. People in general don't want to look stupid, so they aren't going to volunteer a "hey, what the heck am I looking at here?" They'll jus…
This appeals to an intuitive sense, but I question the validity of claiming that there exists an information dense format that does not require training to read. Do you have an example of one?
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#24Really nice graphics. It might be interesting to be able to select a region and have a pop-out that zooms into that region and maybe shows additional information. For example, showing cpu performance I would like to select a region where performance declines and get a pop-out that shows a more detailed view and includes network, disk access and memory statistics. I am sure there are many more uses though. Keep up the nice work!
Edit: Not really the purpose I know but it was just something that struck me as a possible use case.
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#25never heard of horizon charts before, and found it amazing. http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/horizon/
If by "amazing" means "I need an explanation to see what I'm seeing", then I agree with you. Analytics visualizations are great when they're pretty, but if they aren't comprehensible, you've failed. In the vast (>1) user testing I've done with horizon graphs, it just isn't grokkable. People in general don't want to look stupid, so they aren't going to volunteer a "hey, what the heck am I looking at here?" They'll jus…
Agreed; horizon charts take some explanation. However, once you understand what they're showing, they become quite natural. That makes them suitable for dashboards that are monitored by a regular audience (say, production engineers, stock traders), since the viewer learns the first time and then benefits subsequently from the concise representation. However, I probably wouldn't recommend them for a mass audience in a one-off visualization, where the effort to understand might be beyond the viewer's patience for a single viewing.
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#26I was just coding up some d3 time series visualizations, and bang! Square delivers. Thanks mbostock!!
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#27never heard of horizon charts before, and found it amazing. http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/horizon/
If by "amazing" means "I need an explanation to see what I'm seeing", then I agree with you. Analytics visualizations are great when they're pretty, but if they aren't comprehensible, you've failed. In the vast (>1) user testing I've done with horizon graphs, it just isn't grokkable. People in general don't want to look stupid, so they aren't going to volunteer a "hey, what the heck am I looking at here?" They'll jus…
yes, it needs explanation but:
- you do not confuse it with something else when you 1st see it.
- one glance at the image from the link I posted and you instantly knows how it works!
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#28never heard of horizon charts before, and found it amazing. http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/horizon/
If by "amazing" means "I need an explanation to see what I'm seeing", then I agree with you. Analytics visualizations are great when they're pretty, but if they aren't comprehensible, you've failed. In the vast (>1) user testing I've done with horizon graphs, it just isn't grokkable. People in general don't want to look stupid, so they aren't going to volunteer a "hey, what the heck am I looking at here?" They'll jus…
I think most visualizations require a bit of explanation to understand. The standard rrdtool graphs in Munin, for instance, are surprisingly complicated to understand the first time you see them. And smokeping is a fabulous tool despite having a totally idiosyncratic display. Horizon charts also take a little time to get, but not much.
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#29I'm less interested with the graphing and more interested in Cube itself, which seems to be a nice simple data warehouse solution. Has anyone used this in production? How does it compare with other data warehousing projects? Are there any prominent alternatives?
My startup uses it in production. We probably send a couple million events a day and have a big dashboard with around 40 graphs on it. We also have other dashboards split out for viewing specific things. It works pretty well once we got MongoDB tuned properly. We're receiving events via UDP (which we had to add in, but is supported out of the box in the new version, I believe)
I don't think it's meant to be used as a full-on data warehouse. The closest thing people usually compare it to is Graphite.
Re: Cubism.js: time series visualization
#30Oh thank goodness. I thought this was about timecube.com