A Topic-Based Visualization Tool for Distributed Publish/Subscribe Messaging

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has become a central design philosophy across many enterprise and organizational domains. Communication within and across enterprises is critical to allow interconnection and interoperation across service components and providers. Enterprise messaging refers to the set of technologies that enables companies to interconnect several units of their business, forming a network typically deployed across multiple locations. For these enterprise messaging networks, publish/subscribe is a communication paradigm that is gaining significant popularity. Traditional network monitoring tools can show topologies, statistics and various low-level endpoint relationships. Publish/Subscribe systems however facilitate communications at a much higher level than traditional networks via producing and consuming messages that are identified by topics. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a visual tool that takes a topic-centric approach to visualizing communications in a publish/subscribe network. We propose a novel combination of a compact visual syntax and interaction techniques to help publish/subscribe network administrators and application developers understand and manage topic-specific message flows and their performance on networks. Several users have applied our tool to real-world industrial settings and have validated its effectiveness.