Creative Way of Visualizing Data

Large data centers have millions of servers, and visualizing the health data of all of them is challenging. An important aspect of monitoring a fleet of servers is to know which ones are alive and which ones are offline. A modern data center can house many thousands of servers in a building. We can use a heatmap to display information about thousands of servers compactly in a data center.

A heatmap is a data visualization technique that shows the magnitude of a phenomenon in two dimensions by using colors.

Using heatmaps to troubleshoot

We will identify if a server is down by using heatmaps. Each rack of servers is named and is sorted by data center, then cluster, then row, so problems common at any of these levels are readily apparent.

A heat map depicting the operational state of a large number of components is an effective method. The health of each component is indicated by the color of each cell in a big matrix. Nodes with green cells operate within permitted parameters, while nodes with red cells are non-responsive on multiple tries.

Below we have a heatmap displaying the server’s state (alive/dead).