Introduction

OverView is a toolkit for visualization of distributed systems, and is designed to be generic (that is, able to be applied to many different distributed systems), scalable (that is, to scale up to very large distributed systems), and dynamic (that is, functioning as well online as it does offline). OverView is written in Java and is designed to work with any arbitrary Java system via a custom unintrusive profiling mechanism and a simple declarative language (called the Entity Specification Language) which describes how to map Java method invocations into a high-level description of visualization events. Figure D.1 shows how OverView visualizes an actor creation event.

Figure D.1: These three figures, from left to right, were captured from OverView when an actor was created. The outer square represents a SALSA theater, while the inner circles represent SALSA actors. Lines between actors represent SALSA message sending behavior.

Please note that OverView requires Java 1.5 to compile and run.