I was attending the RSA Conference all week long. During one day my mission was to find out what the state of visualization in security products is. Here is what I found:
- Most products have reporting features
- A lot of products use dashboards which let you interact and drill-down into the details. This generally means clicking on one of the bars in a bar chart to get to the underlying textual representation of the events.
- Some products use drilldowns to get from one dashboard to another (nice!)
- Some proudcts let you customize the dashboards or change the visualization parameters interactively. Keyword: Dynamic Queries (very nice!)
- Only one company that I talked to uses a visual interface (a treemap) as their main way of interacting with the product. They even let you change the parameters on the fly! (very very nice!l!)
My whish list:
- More visual interfaces.
- More interactive dashboards. Being able to drill-down from one dashboard into another to get more information.
- More meaningful dashboards. Tell me why a certain graph is important in the dashboard. What's the use-case for showing it?
- More products using better visualization (have you heard of treemaps?)
- Interactive visuals. Let me choose how I want my data represented. Make it configurable. But don't overload the interface with features. Make sure there are valid use-cases and make them obvious to me! Wizzards?