" Seeing " data.
Sometimes the visualisation of data can be difficult, consider displaying user activity for a multinational application.
This is exactly what I wanted to do in such a manner that I could see who and when was using the system, however with over fifty countries at a five minute granularity this means a grid of 288 x 50 cells and even if you could get it on screen the actual information would be difficult to take in.
My solution was to use SSRS and an area graph, the link below shows a sanitised version of the report but it gives a flavour of the real thing, the only thing not changed are the times and colours.
http://www.grumpyolddba.co.uk/monitoring/MERKATActivity.htm
The actual report has real country names, links to tabular reports and each country has a click through to show a line graph for that country's activity for the day. The report also takes a parameter to allow historical reporting and can show activity for the current day in near real time , sadly it can't forward predict as a colleague suggested it might!
It's actually a very easy way to see if you have available windows of low activity for maintenance and it's easy for anyone who might be interested in system use. It can also answer questions such as how many users from Xyz were in today and overall system peaks are easy to view.
There's no code as the data comes from an application. This is part of a suite of reports for tracking server and application performance, I'll publish more at another time.