SitaVis — Interactive situation awareness visualization of large datasets

VAST 2012 Mini Challenge 1 Award: Honorable mention for good situational awareness snapshot. We present SitaVis, a visualization and situational awareness tool for the analysis of the health of a computer network. Network datasets are large and therefore we have developed an interactive framework that enables the dynamic exploration and interactive analysis of the data using aggregation techniques and Microsoft's XNA framework. Machine health data is queried and analysed through visual and direct manipulation of our visualizations. SitaVis includes stacked area graphs, dense pixel plots and geographic representations of the data, and offers situational awareness of large geographically dispersed networks. This paper describes the development and use of the SitaVis that was applied to the VAST 2012 mini-challenge 1, cyber situation awareness data.