Flow-inspector: a framework for visualizing network flow data using current web technologies

New web technologies led to the development of browser applications for data analysis. Modern browser engines allow for building interactive real-time visualization applications that enable efficient ways to understand complex data. We present Flow-Inspector, a highly interactive open-source web framework for visualizing network flow data using latest web technologies. Flow-Inspector includes a backend for processing and storing large-scale network flow data, as well as a JavaScript-based web application capable to display and manipulate traffic information in real-time. This work provides operators with a toolkit to analyze their networks and enables the scientific community to create new and innovative visualizations of traffic data with an extensible framework. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by implementing several different visualization components that help to identify topological characteristics in network flows.