An online visualization system for streaming log data of computing clusters

Monitoring a computing cluster requires collecting and understanding log data generated at the core, computer, and cluster levels at run time. Visualizing the log data of a computing cluster is a challenging problem due to the complexity of the underlying dataset: it is streaming, hierarchical, heterogeneous, and multi-sourced. This paper presents an integrated visualization system that employs a two-stage streaming process mode. Prior to the visual display of the multi-sourced information, the data generated from the clusters is gathered, cleaned, and modeled within a data processor. The visualization supported by a visual computing processor consists of a set of multivariate and time variant visualization techniques, including time sequence chart, treemap, and parallel coordinates. Novel techniques to illustrate the time tendency and abnormal status are also introduced. We demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed system framework on a commodity cloud-computing platform.