The Internet is constantly evolving and changing over time. Outages, attacks, upgrades, censorships, and policy changes modify the routing very frequently everywhere in the world. To give the possibility to the Internet Service Providers and to the network operators of monitoring such an evolving scenario, many organizations collect the routing changes and give free access to them. We propose, prototype, and evaluate a visual interface, called Upstream Visibility, to display such data. It is based on three views: (1) a global view that, based on stacked area charts, gives the high level trend of the visibility of an IP prefix; (2) a local view allows the user to check the effects over time of the visibility of an IP prefix on specific locations of the network; and (3) a traditional graph animation view. Also, we propose heuristics for producing such type of drawings, evaluating their effectiveness and performance against scenarios describing well-known Internet incidents.

Several projects deploy probes in the Internet. Probes are systems that continuously perform traceroutes and other networking measurements (e.g., ping) towards selected targets. Measurements can be stored and analyzed to gain knowledge on several aspects of the Internet, but making sense of such data requires suitable methods and tools for exploration and visualization. We present Radian, a tool that allows to visualize traceroute paths at different levels of detail and to animate their evolution during a selected time interval. We also describe extensive tests of the tool using traceroutes performed by RIPE Atlas Internet probes.