Description

This animated example displays images of the world map, the map of Japan, and the map of the island of Okinawa in Japan, with a moving terminator (dividing line between night and day). Each frame reflects one hour of data.

Geographically scattered data points illustrate the byte count of traffic exchanged between each data point and residential customers in Japan, as seen by this ISP ('to' and 'from' directions summed together). The legend explains the color and height coding of the data values as follows. The color changes on a logarithmic scale and makes visible even the smallest quantities of traffic. The height changes linearly and allows us to compare changes in large volumes of traffic.

The histogram in the lower left corner displays the total number of bytes (per hour) flowing through this ISP during the 24-hour period of collection. The X-axis shows time since the beginning of the measurement. The absolute UTC time of the day written above the histogram corresponds to the beginning of each hourly interval. Note that the local time in Japan is 9 hours ahead of UTC time. Hence, the period between 7 and 17 hours since the beginning of measurement corresponds to the period between 14 and 1 (next day) hours of UTC time, or 23 and 10 hours of local Japanese time. During the night and early morning hours, traffic caused by Japanese residential customers is minimal.

The animation clearly shows a correlation between the residential broadband customer traffic through the Japanese ISP and the time of day in Japan.

The Configuration and Data File

Each of the objects and the data in the animation below is explicitly defined in the configuration file unique to this example. This particular example includes the default global map, the three maps described above, the histogram, the color legend, and 24 frames containing 5,221 nodes with 56,808 associated values spanning the 24-hour period.

For details on the objects and attributes recognized by Cuttlefish, see the README.config file.