Data Visualization with D3 and AngularJS

Chapter 9. Building a Real-time Visualization to Monitor Server Logs

In previous chapters, you learned different ways to load, process, and visualize data in the browser. In this chapter, we want to use all this knowledge to build an application that lets us monitor and visualize server logs in real time. If we think about a typical client-server approach, our application is divided into two parts: a web server that monitors log files and a client that interprets and visualizes these logs.

In the first section of this chapter, we will set up a Node.js server with the Express framework and use the built-in file system tools to monitor log files. We will propagate file changes in real time to the client with the use of a bidirectional WebSocket connection; ...