Interactive graph features

The Allegro Network Multimeter uses a graphical representation of the historic data in many places. Uses include packet and byte counter over time for IP addresses, MAC addresses, individual connections, peers, etc. Response time graphs are also used to display the response times of different services such as HTTP, SSL, and others.

Those graphs can be interactively manipulated to make exploring historic data easy. The following mouse commands are available:

• Left mouse click: zooms into the clicked position
• Mouse selection with left mouse button: zoom into selected interval

• Right mouse click: zooms out of the clicked position

Holding the Shift key allows more interactive features:

• Shift + left mouse click: zooms into the clicked position
• Shift + mouse wheel up: zooms into the clicked position

• Shift + right mouse click: zooms out of the clicked position
• Shift + mouse wheel down: zooms out of the clicked position

• Shift + mouse drag: move graph to dragged direction without zooming (also known as panning)

These interactive features make it easier to explore past network events in contrast to manually selecting a specific time frame via the upper right control buttons.

The Back-in-Time functionality pages contains additional information about restrictions of selecting a specific interval.

Each individual graph can also be viewed in a detailed view spanning the whole window by clicking on the the magnifying glass icon on the right hand side of the graph. This will open a window containing only this graph. The detail level is also increased by a factor of 4 to show more data points. All interactive features like selecting an interval or dragging the graph are still available.

Beneath the magnifying glass icon there is also an icon which opens a drop down menu containing additional information about the graph. First, there is a help button to this manual entry for easier access. Second, the graph stepping is shown which describes the time difference between each data point. Depending on the zoom level and the age of the data the stepping is chosen automatically. For older data, the graph resolution is reduced to save memory and make data available for a longer time but this also means the detail level is reduced. The stepping gives a hint how detailed the information are. If you zoom in but the stepping remains the same, it basically means that there is no more detailed data available. If multiple data sources are drawn in a single graph (like multiple IP address graphs), the graph resolution might be different for each data row so the minimum and maximum graph resolution is shown in this case.

It is possible to modify the graph resolution in the Graph detail settings.

Additional graph settings

The drop down menu beneath the magnifying glass also contains entries to change the graph style from four different styles:

• Filled: This is the default style which draws lines for each data set and fills the area underneath for better readability.
• Regular lines: This style uses just lines for each data set.
• Thick lines: This style draws thicker lines.
• Stacked: This style uses filled areas and stacks each data set on another.

The settings are stored per user and changing a setting for one graph changes the settings for all other graphs automatically.