Improving productivity and reducing cost through the use of visualizations for SDN management

Visualization means the use of Information Visualization (InfoVis) techniques to augment human cognitive capacity to support users tasks more efficiently. According to the current literature, visualization is a relevant requirement to support the management of Software-Defined Networking (SDN). For example, visualization can help network administrators in everyday tasks such as in the identification of traffic patterns, or in the implementation and test of new networking services. However, in most cases, network administrators are unskilled on InfoVis, which makes them naturally reluctant in the use of visualizations. Also, building up visualizations from scratch can spend a significant amount of effort, which directly impacts on the increase of cost and the decrease of administrators' productivity. Thus, in this paper, we introduce a reuse-based approach to facilitating the employment of visualizations in the SDN context with the focus on improving productivity and reduce costs. We developed a prototype to evaluate and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. The obtained results to one of the usage scenarios show, for example, that our solution can decrease in 264 hours the administrators' workload (i.e., around U$ 9,976.56) when employing visualizations in daily tasks.