Visualizing Network Status

The recent evolution of various communication devices makes both network monitoring and configuration difficult. Although these network management tasks require deep understanding of network status, various new network devices make it difficult by increasing the complexity of whole network system. This paper proposes a visualization technique of network status that uses a frequent itemset mining algorithm to find important phenomena in the network. We also show that a simple interface with the proposed technique can visualize not only the ordinal network status but also the various security incidents. The understanding of the ordinal network status and the rapid finding of security incident helps the naive users in monitoring and configuring network equipments. Finding of various security incidents from real Internet traffic data are described as the typical usage of the proposed visualization technique.