Sparkline charts and visual alerting are examples of visual elements that can be used effectively in monitoring applications. A Sparkline chart is a very small line chart that can some information about the status of some item or process using very little screen space. Multiple sparklines are often presented on a single page to allow users to quickly assess trends on multiple items simultaneously. Visual Alerts are indicators placed on a chart that suggest that the data in the chart may be of some particular interest. They can be used to quickly draw the users eye to a issue that needs immediate attention. NetCharts combines Sparkline and Visual Alerts in a way that allows users to efficiently monitor a complex set of processes.

This example shows sparkline charts for 8 separate sensors. Each sparkline shows the trend of the most recent 30 values for each sensor. The colored side tab acts as a visual alert to indicate whether the trend for a sensor requires attention. The alert status can be determined using custom code or with NetCharts library of predefined analytic functions. Clicking on any of the individual sparklines updated the large chart in the center of the application with a more detailed more interactive view of that sensors data.