One of my favorite movies of all time is WarGames, which depicted a teenage hacker accidentally breaking into NORAD and starting a nuclear war simulation that almost turned into a real catastrophe. The movie featured state-of-the-art dashboards (at least for 1983) showing simulated missile launches by different countries.
Now you can create Sumo Logic dashboards like the ones shown in this movie using our new Connection Map panel.
Making connections for visualization and security
As its name suggests, a connection map shows the connections between several positions on a map. It is great for showing connections and relationships geographically.
Beyond displaying missile flight paths, you can of course use the new panel type for slightly more peaceful use cases, such as showing network traffic flow volume from different regions, including questionable traffic that may be hacking attempts. Visualizing these security analytics can improve your threat response and security posture.
To use this feature, select the Map Panel and choose Missile as the chart type.
Two other chart types are now available for Sumo Logic’s dashboards: Sankey and Box Plot.
Go with the flow with Sankey diagrams
Sankey is a specific type of flow diagram named after Irish Captain Matthew Sankey, an engineer who used this type of diagram in 1898 to show the energy efficiency of a steam engine. In Sumo Logic, flow diagrams can show the flow within a distributed system, for example, or how customers flow through your website via states, which are triggered by log events.
Adding insight into your Real User Monitoring (RUM), these states can show you how long customers take to complete purchases, or even where users drop off your site or app. The width of an arrow or stripe is used to show the proportion of a quantity such as the number of users going through different navigation paths. Sankey has been available as a visualization type for log search. Now you can also use it in dashboards.
To create a Sankey diagram in your dashboard, select the Categorical Panel and choose Sankey as the chart type.
Never lose the plot with box plot charts
Sometimes, you need to visualize a set of time series data but a basic line chart or histogram is not enough. Box plot could be an option. It graphically depicts groups of data using quartiles, which are the values that divide a list of numbers into quarters. The bottom and top of the box represent the first and third quartiles; the band inside the box represents the median and the top and bottom lines represent the range. A very common use case for box plot is a statistical summary of daily stock price, but it can also be used for showing application response times, error rates, and just about any time series dataset with a range of values. Box plot is a carryover feature from Sumo Logic’s classic dashboards so your previous panels and queries can be reused.
To use box plot charts, select the Time Series Panel and choose Box Plot as the chart type.
There you have it – three new panel types to visualize your data! These updates join some other exciting dashboard features that Sumo Logic offers, like bubble charts and scatter charts. If you’re an existing Sumo Logic user with ‘classic’ dashboards (which don’t include some of these options), consider migrating to the updated dashboards today with our auto-migration tool.
