Heatmaps and more heatmaps

I’ve talked with a few Cloud Analytics users who weren’t sure how to interpret the latency heatmaps. While we certainly aren’t the first to use heatmaps in performance analysis, they’re not yet common and they can use some explanation the first time you see them. I posted a simple example a few weeks ago, but video’s worth a thousand words so I’ve made a screencast covering a different example and explaining the heatmap basics:

Thanks to Deirdré for posting the video.

You can also check out Aaron’s demo of Cloud Analytics in Joyent’s SmartDataCenter product.

Finally, here are a few completely unrelated but interesting examples of heatmaps:

• Distribution of passes by Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, and Ben Roethlisberger (NY Times)
• S&P 500 annual return over 90 years (NY Times)

The stock market return heatmap particularly emphasizes how much information you can pack into a heatmap (nearly 4000 data points, all individually represented) in a way that readers can still make sense of.