Updates to Network Topology View
March 23, 2006
Heya,
Just dropping in with a quick update here. Last time I talked about the new network topology view, this time I want to show things that have been added to this view recently. Views like this tend to be very organic in that they grow features that'll hopefully make the user's life easier.
The first thing I did was to color/bold the traceroutes. This really helps the visibility of the line and connects the path in a more meaningful way with the list on the lower right (which always had 2 colors).
The other features I added have to do with how you interact with the graph and get it to look how you want it to look. I attacked this problem from several fronts.
- Allow the user to control the global spring/repellent forces. These sliders let you deal with oscillations you don't like or make things more spread out. The default values do work well in most circumstances, but if you want the view to have a specific amount of “breathing room” they make that possible.
- Added the ability to lock down specific nodes. This lets you anchor specific nodes where you want them and at the same time let the simulation push the other nodes around. During testing I found that if you lock down around 3 nodes you'll get something pretty reasonable most of the time.
- You can also now hide nodes. This can break the topology apart but it allows you to completely remove nodes you don't care about (especially handy when you have a lot of multiply connected nodes close to each other)
- Finally, the ability to limit the depth of hops you see from the selected node
In very complicated graphs you sometimes have too much information. This lets you see a specific subset of the nodes and allows you to trace down the connections you're intersted in. In the shot above I have it set to depth = 2. All nodes that have other connected nodes of interest have a * by them. Clicking nearer to those nodes will expand them (and the further ones will disappear).
I'm sure as time passes and we find different graphs we might add some more things to make navigating this view easier.
