Time Visualization Reveals Hidden Information

A significant portion of application data has a time component. If you think of sales tracking software, for example, there is information about when a sales person joined the company, when they left, the times and dates of their sales, when payments are due on those sales, and even when their parking permit was issued.

Normally users look through data ordered by time, but there often is a "hidden" meaning in how close or how far apart events happen; events might happen at the same time, one event might start before something else has finished.. The timing of events, beyond simply the order, can be a key performance indicator.

To find these correlations, grids and lists simply are not the tool for the job. These user interface components give no indication of the distance, in time, between entries., Truly, temporal data can be better visualized to make additional information instantly apparent.
Our experience and research has shown that something as simple as data placed on a graphical time line can instantly reveal additional information. If data elements have a start and end time, they may be best visualized with a bar, making it easy to see when items overlap. Separate different types of data using colors and place text along or inside your events that describe your data very briefly.

When you visualize data this way it will be easier to find clusters of events that you would not normally see in text format. Those clusters might tell you something critical. Equally important, "missing" clusters may also signal problems or other important information.

By using these techniques, you’re engaging your brains visual system in analyzing the data in addition to your intellectual system. You visual system is extremely good at pattern detection and recognition. Your intellectual system will appreciate offloading the work, and you will become more productive and hence happier without really understanding why.

Using the GTP.NET product from plexityHide, and about 50 lines of code, you can visualize the Windows event log as described above. Download the sample app and take a look into your event log. Browse and zoom the time scale and feel and see for yourself how. Beware that you may find unexpected things when your data is presented this way, like how comes there is a cluster of security events 5 minutes after my backup job was fired?
 

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Technologies; GTP.NET is a built bottom up to support Windows Forms, ASP.NET, ASP.NET Ajax and XPAB.