Abstract: Exploring Performance Data with Boxfish

Abstract

The growth in size and complexity of scaling applications and the systems on which they run pose challenges in analyzing and improving their overall performance. With metrics coming from thousands or millions of processes, visualization techniques are necessary to make sense of the increasing amount of data. To aid the process of exploration and understanding, we announce the initial release of Boxfish, an extensible tool for manipulating and visualizing data pertaining to application behavior. Combining and visually presenting data and knowledge from multiple domains, such as the application's communication patterns and the hardware's network configuration and routing policies, can yield the insight necessary to discover the underlying causes of observed behavior. Boxfish allows users to query, filter and project data across these domains to create interactive, linked visualizations.