Immersive Network Monitoring

This paper presents the immersive network monitoring system that is used for real-time and retrospective analysis of network traffic. The 3-D representations are designed from the perspective of monitoring traffic at an administrative boundary between the Internet and an internal network. In the virtual environment, a physical boundary and defended territory serve as a familiar visual metaphor for users. The user is provided with multiple ways of exploring the environment and interrogating visual objects for additional information and synchronizing the environment with external analysis tools. The paper has used this system on complete data from multiple sites for purposes of situational awareness and detecting and analyzing traffic patterns for anomalous behavior.