Bar charts, pie charts, line graphs, plots – is there any new way to present information? Over at Smashing Magazine, there is an article that describes a vast array of ways to present data described across the web. Bookmark this site, then go and visit the sites and articles that it lists. This list is fantastic, although creating such charts may be a challenge (or perhaps not).
How might you use such charts and so on? How about a graphical display of the traffic in the network on a typical day? How about a graphical display of the utilization of a host over time or by some other quantity? How about disk space growth analyzed according to some other quantity (such as time of day)?
It has been written elsewhere how using statistical tools such as R can assist in analyzing data; perhaps they also have the ability to create some of these unique displays.
Some of the tools listed in the article are also online tools; try them out!