I originally posted this at http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2012/12/10/usenix-lisa-2010-visualizations-for-performance-analysis.
My USENIX LISA talk from 2010 is now available on youtube, also embedded below. The title is Visualizations for Performance Analysis (and more), and showed how the full distribution of data could be presented as a heat map. This is especially useful for latency analysis, as fast-path and slow-path differences can be studied, as well as latency outliers. I've also written about this before for ACM, with the article Visualizing System Latency.
The video and slides of the talk are below. The slides can also be downloaded as PDF.
I'm delighted to be speaking again at LISA this year in San Diego, on December 13th. My talk is titled Performance Analysis Methodology, and covers existing and new methodologies for approaching system performance.