Best way to visualize product's usage given name, start time and end time

Question

I have a report which has: Product Name, Start Time, End Time.

Amazon DynamoDB 7/1/14 0:00  7/1/14 1:00
Amazon DynamoDB 7/1/14 1:00  7/1/14 2:00
Amazon DynamoDB 7/1/14 4:00  7/1/14 5:00
Amazon DynamoDB 7/1/14 5:00  7/1/14 6:00
Amazon DynamoDB 7/1/14 6:00  7/1/14 7:00
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud    7/1/14 2:00  7/1/14 3:00
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud    7/1/14 3:00  7/1/14 4:00
AWS Data Pipeline   7/1/14 7:00  7/1/14 8:00
AWS Data Pipeline   7/1/14 8:00  7/1/14 9:00

I am brainstorming what's the way to visualize a product's usage i.e. which product is mostly used at a particular time. I tried using PowerBi, Tableau and Quicksight.

Answer 1

If you're viewing usage by a unit of a day

You can try using a binary heatmap with the hours on the x axis, product labels on the left (instead of the days of the week).

Here's an example from d3.js:

Seems like you're not measuring intensity, just usage or null.

You can just use one color to represent usage. The white areas will allow easy contrast for not in use.

You can add a date picker with < > arrows for quick scroll to the next or previous day.