Last week I managed to get back working on cool and innovative (hopefully you will agree) visualization work that I had designed (lots of sketches scattered around my office) a long time back but never managed to get the push to actually realize them within the product until today when we released a first in a series of visualization updates I am actively working on that will raise the bar (sky high) once again (well that is the motivational chant used currently).
In this first update I have tried to tackle a common problem with most application performance profiling/tracing/logging/journaling tools that use ordered child nodes within trees to display sequential execution behavior. The problem being that they do not scale in the enterprise context (too many nested branches and large sequences of nodes), are wasteful of precious screen real-estate, and cause repetitive strain injury (RSI) with excessive clicking to expand & contract nodes (seriously).
The solution is to not use a tree. Instead we use an ordered table that overlays the hierarchical execution nature (caller-to-callee) on top of a flattened sequential execution flow and makes it contextual (based on the current selection). And best of all we can display the execution of multiple concurrent threads side-by-side (to be exact its row by row) which is impossible with trees as the basis for any such visualization. Here is an animated gif showing this in action.
By the way the graphical tree overlay also highlights re-entrant calls on the billed probe stack. Can you see the visual pattern indicator?
