In this new blog section “Coming Soon”, we want to give you an inside look at some innovations to the DataMiner platform that our development teams are currently working on. Today, we’ll talk about the “node-edge component”, a new addition to the catalog of out-of-the box data visualizations for use in the DataMiner dashboarding module.
In many applications, there is a need to visualize certain objects and their interconnections. Think for example of network devices and their physical connectivity, a Kubernetes cluster showing the logical connections between its nodes, pods and containers, or even visualizing video flows between media nodes in an IP network. To tackle these use cases, we are working on a generic HTML Dashboard component that visualizes any type of “nodes” (objects) and their “edges” (connections between them). The component is designed in such a way that all types of DataMiner objects can be visualized as either nodes or edges: be it elements, rows in a table parameter, services, views, etc.
However, the node-edge component is much more than just a visualization on a dashboard. Instead, we really want this component to serve as a true analytics tool. To enable all kinds of analytical use cases, the node-edge component will make it possible to attach parameters & properties of DataMiner elements as KPIs to nodes and edges. These KPIs can then for example be shown in a tooltip on a node or edge. On top of that, the node-edge component will allow the user to dynamically filter out, highlight or color nodes and connections based on their KPIs. This can be used to quickly identify problems among a large set of nodes and see how these problems might affect other nodes. A visualization like this allows an operator to quickly visually correlate a lot of data, which can help to faster analyze incidents. That’s why we believe that this component is a very valuable addition to our range of dashboard visuals.
The data input for the node-edge component can be configured via our Generic Query Language, an SQL-like language which allows to query DataMiner objects, like elements, parameters, DataMiner services, DCF connections etc. Once a query has been created, the settings of the node-edge component allow the user to indicate for each query whether the data should be visualized as nodes or as edges. For a “node-query”, the user is asked to select a unique ID and a display name from the columns fetched via the Generic Interface query. For an “edge query”, the user must identify one column of the query as the Source Node ID, and one column as the Destination Node ID. There can be multiple queries for different types of nodes and different types of edges in one and the same component. The component will then use these settings to automatically draw all the selected nodes and their connections on the component canvas.