Ecological interface design: a new approach for visualizing network management

Effective network management is a key to maximizing the performance of today's networks. Active monitoring of networks is still largely the domain of human network managers and yet, the support tools provided to these operators are typically not integrated and dated in their interface design. Ecological interface design (EID) is a systematic approach, drawn from nuclear power plant control, for designing visualizations that uses a multi-level analysis to develop graphics designed to support problem solving and management activities. We demonstrate the adaptation of this approach to network management and show how visualization tools can be designed. Finally we evaluated the EID toot against an industry tool, HPOpenView Network Node Manager in a series of detection and diagnosis tasks. While we observed slightly faster detection times with Network Node Manager, the EID tool generated faster diagnosis times and more accurate diagnoses. Finally we took our tool to professional network managers for a qualitative evaluation. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.