NetViz/Probe

NetViz/Probe was an ex­plo­ration into dis­trib­uted com­put­ing and vi­su­al­i­sa­tion. It con­sisted of a front-end, *NetViz* and a back-end, *Probe*. It was roughly de­signed for net­work ad­min­is­tra­tors to get an overview of their net­work.

Probe was a peer-to-peer mesh of dis­trib­uted sens­ing nodes which ac­tively probed net­work topol­ogy and real-time us­age us­ing SNMP. Work was au­to­mat­i­cally shared amongst probe nodes to (relatively) ef­fi­ciently han­dle a large net­work and deal with net­work par­ti­tions.

NetViz was a hy­per­bolic tree-based vi­su­al­i­sa­tion of net­work topol­ogy. Ad­di­tional meta­data was pro­vided about net­work nodes us­ing icons, colour­ing and line weights. Expanding a net­work seg­ment re­veals sub-ranges and even­tu­ally, in­di­vid­ual net­work de­vices such as com­put­ers, print­ers and routers.

A nice trick was that when the user has ex­panded a par­tic­u­lar sec­tion, the Probe mesh would in­crease the rate at which it would probe for sta­tus, and when the user nav­i­gated away from a sec­tion, the prob­ing rate would drop.