Network and service management encompasses a set of activities, methods, procedures, and tools whose ultimate goal is to guarantee the proper functioning of a networked system. Computational tools are essential to help network administrators in their daily tasks, and information visualization techniques are of great value in such context. In essence, information visualization techniques associated to visual analytics aim at facilitating the tasks of network administrators in the process of monitoring and maintaining the network health. This paper surveys the use of information visualization techniques as a tool to support the network and service management process. Through a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we provide a historical overview and discuss the current state of the art in the field. We present a classification of 285 articles and papers from 1985 to 2013, according to an information visualization taxonomy as well as a network and service management taxonomy. Finally, we point out future research directions and opportunities regarding the use of information visualization in network and service management.Taking into account the example mentioned above, [15] and [17] are examples of articles/papers that match with the research goal. Thus, they are stored and cataloged, and their references are verified. In the analysis of the references of [15], for example, we found the work of Koike et al. "Visualizing cyber attacks using IP matrix" [19]. On the other hand, [16] is an example of a work that was discarded after the analysis of the abstract and keywords (i.e., the second step of filtering).Once finished the search process, a set of 374 articles and papers remained selected. These publications are from a time interval ranging from 1985 to 2013.
