How to draw readable, preferably interactive, network graphs with python?

Question

I'm trying to draw a graph of any network running my script. I use scapy to collect packets and would like to have a node per computer communicating, and an edge per connection.

The issue is I can't find a way to visualize the graph well enough on my screen. So far combining networkx with matlib.pyplot managed to bring the best results, but it still seems pretty random and chaotic, the tags are hard to read, nodes are on top of each other, etc'. It is also preferable to have the ability to interact with the graph - move nodes around, hover over nodes/edges to get extra info, perhaps zoom in or even cluster together nodes so that when you click on the cluster you can see which nodes compose the cluster.

Since analyzing the network data and adding nodes&edges to the graph will be tedious for you to read, I'm adding only the relevant part here (the part that actually shows the graph I built):

pos = nx.spring_layout(Graph, scale=2)
edge_labels = nx.get_edge_attributes(Graph, "Protocol")
nx.draw(Graph,pos, with_labels=True, node_size=600, font_size=8, font_weight='bold')
nx.draw_networkx_edge_labels(Graph, pos, edge_labels=edge_labels, font_size=8)
plt.show()

(I imported networks as nx and matplotlib.pyplot as plt)

I also tried graphviz, ploty and bokeh but couldn't really make them work and after troubleshooting on Google got the impression that anyway they won't fix my problem, and I also tried adjustText - but I could not manage to fit it in my code in any way (can't find how to get the text attribute of my graph) and Holoviews - but it refuses to show an image no matter what I try (even if I copy and paste examples from their site - either python says that '%opts...' is invalid syntax, or if I try changing options any other way the code just runs until it ends and doesn't show anything on the screen.

This is what the graph looks like:

I'm finding a lot of partial solutions online so none of them work, does anybody has a comprehensive solution?

Answer 1

Drawing heavy graphs with plt can be a bit problematic, the problem here is not only with the data, it is also a problem for a human eye to get a lot of information in one look. My suggestion is to use a more advanced graph visualization library, for example, ipycytoscape. you can define also styles and more features with it that will match your demands

from ipycytoscape import CytoscapeWidget
graph_draw = ipycytoscape.CytoscapeWidget()
graph_draw.graph.add_graph_from_networkx(nx_graph, directed=True)

In addition, if you will use CytoscapeWidget you can interact with the graph and match the focus of the view to the part in the graph that interests you the most.