Data visualisation with Matplotlib
You turn data into readable charts and prepare visuals that explain security events to managers.
Level 201 · 17 lessons · 15 practice labs
Lessons
First charts
- Installing Matplotlib and your first plot: You install Matplotlib and draw your first line with pyplot.
- Figure and Axes: how a chart is built: You tell figure, axes and line layers apart and move to the object-oriented plotting style.
- Customising a line plot: You make a chart readable by adding colours, line styles, markers, titles, axis labels and a legend.
- Colour, style and accessible charts
- Quick task: a daily alert count chart
Chart types
- Bar charts: You compare categories, for example the number of alerts per server, with bars.
- Scatter plots: You see the relationship between two variables and outlier points in a point cloud.
- Histograms: You view a value’s distribution as bins and see how the bin count changes the interpretation.
- Choosing the right chart: when pie charts mislead: You pick a bar, line, pie or scatter chart to fit the question and avoid misleading visuals.
- Box plots and outliers
- Quick task: the most targeted ports
Compound visuals
- Multiple charts: subplots: You place several charts side by side in one figure.
- Time axes and annotations: You format a date axis and mark the moment of an event on the chart with arrows.
- Heatmaps: hour and day intensity: You turn an hour-by-day table into a heatmap and see the busiest times.
- Saving and sharing charts safely: You save charts on a server without a display and strip sensitive details before sharing.
- Plotting straight from Pandas
- Capstone: an incident summary board: You build a multi-panel summary visual from incident data, ready to present to management.
Practice labs
- A weekly alert line: Draw seven days of alert counts as a line chart with a title, axis labels and units and save it as alerts.png.
- Two series on one chart: Plot successful and failed logins on the same axes with a legend and distinguishable line styles.
- Accessible colours and a twin axis: Plot incident count and mean resolution time on twin axes with a colour-blind-safe palette and readable labels.
- A sorted bar chart: Show the ten most blocked countries in a horizontal bar chart sorted from largest to smallest.
- Mark the outlier on a scatter plot: Mark the outlying user in a scatter plot of session length against bytes transferred with a different colour and a label.
- Compare groups with box plots: Compare five data centres' response times with box plots and name the one with the most outliers in the title.
- Fix a pie chart: Turn an unreadable twelve-slice pie chart into a sorted bar chart using the same data.
- Make a truncated axis honest: Start a chart whose y-axis begins at 95 and exaggerates a small difference at zero and correct its title accordingly.
- Choosing a chart for each question: Choose the right chart type for six analysis questions, produce each from the same data set and save them in charts/.
- A four-panel summary: Plot four measurements from the same day as 2×2 subplots with a shared title and consistent axes.
- A day-hour heatmap: Draw a month of RDP login attempts as a day×hour heatmap with a colour bar and axis labels.
- A timeline with annotated events: Add three incident moments to a traffic chart as vertical lines with notes and format the time axis so it is readable.
- Plot straight from a DataFrame: Plot alerts per department with pandas plot and save the figure as both PNG and SVG.
- Clean a figure before sharing: Anonymise the labels of a chart showing internal IPs and usernames, strip the file metadata and save it again.
- A scripted multi-page figure report: Write a script that generates five branches' charts in a loop, saves them into one multi-page PDF and checks the page count.
About this course
You turn data into readable charts and prepare visuals that explain security events to managers.
What you will learn
- First charts
- Chart types
- Compound visuals
Prerequisites
Finishing the level 101 courses of the same path, or knowing those topics, is enough.
Lab environment
Lessons run in your own Kali Linux terminal that opens in the browser. Nothing to install; the lab starts clean in every lesson.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this course right for my level?
- The course is at level 201; it assumes you know the topics of the lower-level courses.
- Is there anything to install?
- No. Every lesson runs in your own lab environment that opens in the browser.
- How do lessons work?
- Each lesson has 8 to 10 steps and a short quiz. Early steps show the command to type, later steps give less help; if two attempts fail, the solution opens.
- Can I try it for free?
- Yes. The first three lessons of every course are free.