Overall
Heatmaps are ideal when you have a set of assets and you’d like to look at a particular value across each of them, over time.
They are a great alternative to line graphs when you have a large number of values to view. While line-graphs become difficult to read with as few as five channels, heatmaps allow for almost any number of channels, although are less exact.
This example heatmap is a hybrid visualisation – combining both historical and live data to pre-load a heatmap that is then kept up-to-date with live information.
Example
This example shows the height of each of 150+ roof supports that are underground in our demo longwall mine.
As the mine is cut, each of the supports move forward. Part of that process is for each roof support to ‘duck down’ – to become slightly shorter so it has room to move forward.
Using this heatmap, we can clearly see the line that indicates where the supports have dropped down off the roof so they can move forward.
In practise, heatmaps are often a great way to view large amounts of data to spot potential problems.
You can find this example on our longwall mine demo site.
- They work best if there’s an underlying order to the assets you want to view – for example, going from Pump #1 to Pump #10, or from the start of the production line to the finish. This helps make your heatmap more understandable to your readers.
See Others
Heatmap visualisationsInfographic visualisations
Interactive visualisations
Live visualisations