Python visualization

We gather network data for the purpose of gaining insight into our network. One of the best ways to know what the data means is to visualize them with graphs. This is true for almost all data, but especially true for time series data in the context of network monitoring. How much data was transmitted on the wire in the last week? What is the percentage of the TCP protocol among all of the traffic? These are values we can glean from using data-gathering mechanisms, such as SNMP, and visualize with some of the popular Python libraries.

In this section, we will use the data we collected from the last section on SNMP and use two popular Python libraries--Matplotlib and Pygal--to graph them.

Matplotlib

Matplotlib (http://matplotlib.org/) is a plotting library for the Python library and its NumPy mathematical extension. It can produce publication-quality figures, such as plots, histograms, and bar graphs with a few lines of code.

Note

NumPy is an extension of the Python programming...