Visualizing Huge Tracefiles with Xscal

Xscal is a tool for visualizing the behavior of large numbers of comparable entities such as computers, routers, processes, users, etc. The input to Xscal is a table of numbers and strings, which can represent a system snapshot at an instant of time or an event trace of system activity over time. Xscal depicts the global distribution of values in one or two columns of that data. The user can then annotate the visualization to denote categories of behavior, after which Xscal can depict detailed information on entities in each category. Originally developed to study massively parallel computation, Xscal is applicable to a wide variety of system analysis tasks, from visualizing the process table or accounting statistics for a large server to studying the performance of a large network.