Synchronized Temporal and Frequency Visualizations for System Monitoring
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Solution Overview
Problem
Conventional system monitoring tools lack efficient mechanisms for concurrently viewing and manipulating time and frequency-based visualizations of metric values, and fail to effectively correlate metric value instances with specific system events, hindering the identification and diagnosis of computing system performance issues.
Innovation Solution
A user interface that synchronizes temporal and frequency visualizations in response to user interactions, allowing for the efficient presentation of metric values in both domains, with features like time window manipulation and percentile controls, enabling automatic updates of visualizations based on user selections and local data caching to reduce query overhead.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If conventional monitoring tools display metric values separately in temporal or frequency domains, then the interface is simple to implement, but the efficiency of concurrent analysis and correlation of metric values with system events is poor
Solution Approach 1:
The patent combines temporal visualization (time series plot) and frequency visualization (histogram) into a single unified interface that displays both domains simultaneously. The temporal plot shows metric values over time while the histogram displays the frequency distribution of those same values, allowing users to perform concurrent analysis without switching between separate tools or views. This merging resolves the contradiction by enabling efficient concurrent analysis while maintaining interface simplicity through integration rather than multiplication of separate displays.
Solution Approach 2:
The unified visualization interface serves multiple functions simultaneously: it displays temporal trends, shows frequency distributions, enables correlation analysis between metric values and system events, and provides filtering capabilities across both domains. This multi-functionality allows a single interface to replace what would otherwise require multiple separate monitoring tools, improving productivity without proportionally increasing complexity.
2Difficulty of detecting and measuring
If conventional tools display all metric values without synchronization, then the data presentation is comprehensive, but the correlation of specific metric value instances with system events is inefficient
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements bidirectional synchronization between the temporal and frequency visualizations. When a user selects or hovers over a specific time point in the temporal plot, the histogram automatically updates to show the frequency distribution for that specific time window, and vice versa. This feedback mechanism enables efficient correlation of metric values with system events by providing immediate contextual information about the relationship between temporal occurrences and frequency patterns, resolving the contradiction by making correlation detection easy while preserving complete metric value context through dynamic updating.
Solution Approach 2:
The synchronization mechanism acts as an intermediary that links the temporal and frequency domains. When users interact with one visualization, the intermediary processes the selection and translates it into the corresponding view in the other domain, enabling efficient correlation without losing information about metric values in either domain. This intermediary function resolves the contradiction by facilitating easy correlation while maintaining comprehensive data presentation.
3Speed
If the visualization updates in real-time with every user interaction, then the analysis responsiveness is high, but the system performance overhead increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements selective updating of the visualizations based on user interactions. Instead of completely regenerating both temporal and frequency views for every interaction, the system performs partial updates only for the specific portions of the data that are affected by the user's action. For example, when filtering is applied, only the relevant subsets of data are reprocessed and displayed, while the rest of the visualization remains unchanged. This partial action approach maintains high analysis responsiveness while reducing system performance overhead by avoiding unnecessary full reprocessing.
Data Source
AI summary
A system includes presentation of a first visualization of a first set of the plurality of samples on the display device, each sample of the first set associated with a time within a first time period, and the first visualization plotting a time against a metric value for each sample of the first set, presentation of a first histogram of the first set on the display device, the first histogram indicating, for each of a first plurality of metric categorizations, a number of samples of the first set associated with the metric categorization. Changing of the first period to a second time period results in cross-synchronization of the visualizations with a second set of data samples associated with the second time period. A first sample of the first set and associated with a first metric categorization may be identified as associated with a first stored event trace, where the first visualization presents a first indicator in association with the first metric categorization and which indicates the first stored event trace.