A Reuse-Based Approach to Promote the Adoption of Visualizations for Network Management Tasks

Information Visualization (InfoVis) is a powerful tool to assist network administrators in daily tasks, and several authors report investigations about visualization techniques for network management. However, we have observed a fundamental issue that has not been addressed yet: how to promote the adoption of visualizations by network administrators, focusing on improving productivity and reducing costs? We claim that, in general, administrators do not have expertise in the InfoVis domain. Thus, the adoption of visualizations tends to be expensive and decrease the productivity of administrators, in special, because they lose focus on their core tasks. To overcome the raised issue, in this paper, we introduce a reuse-based approach (named as VisNSM) that aims to promote and encourage the adoption of visualizations for network management. To analyze and evaluate the feasibility of VisNSM, we have conducted a case study, and the obtained results show that our approach can significantly reduce costs and improve productivity.