The network management area deals with large amounts of data. Some of its protocols and techniques are not completely understood when it comes to usage patterns and most used features. The understanding of such characteristics is a challenging process, due to the massive data amount involved. This process can be supported by information visualization techniques. These consist in visual representations of data that make use of the unique properties of the human visual system to make insights about it in a more intuitive and effective way. In this context, interactivity has proved itself to be one of the main factors involved in providing such intuitiveness and effectiveness, specially in analysis of large datasets. Nevertheless, few interaction possibilities are available in current network management traffic visualization systems. In this paper we present a set of interactive information visualization techniques adapted to visualize SNMP trace files. We used an insight-based evaluation to show how the presented techniques can aid on the insight achievement process.

The Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), proposed almost 20 years ago, still remains as the de facto standard for TCPIIP networks managing. However, there are few studies that present the real usage of SNMP in production networks. This work aims at presenting a characterization study that was performed over a sample of the management traffic from the Brazilian Education and Research Network (RNP). The achieved results may help both academy and industry in the development of new technologies for managing networks, in order to better meet the needs of the production networks users and administrators.