What is AfterGlow?

I am often facing the problem to look at complex datasets to understand the relationships of the various entries. Instead of reading through the file, line by line, I like to look at graphs that visualize the data. One type of graphs which is very powerful to visualize relationships among entities, are so-called linked graphs or network graphs. Different open source libraries can draw these types of graphs, but all of them require input in a very specific format - generally a graph description language. AfterGlow facilitates the generation of these inputs for graphing libraries.

  • AfterGlow 1.x is a collection of scripts which facilitate the process of generating link graphs. AfterGlow 1.x is written in Perl and is meant to be used on the command line. There is no graphical user interface available. AfterGlow expects a CSV file as input and generates either an attributed graph langugage file that can be processed by the graphiviz libraries, or it can generate output for consumption by the large grpah library (LGL).

    The two main datasets that I had to visualize lately were network packet captures (pcap files) and email logs (sendmail). I spent some time generating parsers for tcpdump (pcap) output and sendmail log files to convert them into csv output. People using pf under OpenBSD will find the pf2csv parser useful as well. These scripts are also part of the AfterGlow library!

    Submit Your Graphs!

    I encourage you to submit your graphs on secviz.org.