Software Diagnostics Institute

In the past, I paid little attention to traditional performance and system behavior visualizations, for example, for time series. My own visualizations included Dia|gram graphical language for software narratives such as traces and logs and, recently, memory snapshots. My latest exposure to open-source observability and visualization tools led me to think about how to describe patterns I see in a pattern language. It is easy to communicate what I see by just sending the picture, but often, we need to compare it to the previous observations or do some symbolic processing of such information.

I decided to tailor existing rich diagnostic analysis pattern languages I developed over the last +15 years into the Language of visualizations that I simply call the Lov language, my new old love of visualizations of software behavior (no pun intended). It is not a programming language but primarily a language for description and analysis; also, it can be used for hypothesis testing and simulation with the appropriate tool support. The initial inspiration for Lov comes from two dual activities: visualization synthesis for time series data and analysis of such visualizations. For a simple initial illustration, the visualization description above of CPU consumption for all processes in the system reuses the existing Discontinuity for all PID Adjoint Threads of Activity and Blackout trace and log analysis patterns. We also see Signals for Counter Values. More Lov to come in the forthcoming months.