Visualize Data in a Monitoring System

Large data centers have millions of servers, and visualizing the health data for 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 heat map to display information about thousands of servers compactly in a data center.

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

Using heat maps to troubleshoot

We’ll identify if a server is down by using heat maps. 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 nonresponsive on multiple tries.

Below, we have a heat map displaying the server’s state.