Methods and system for sample-driven visual programming system. A Parser Utility and a Trigger Utility are provided. The Parser is defined based on a sample output from a device in real time, and data are parsed into a set of variables. The Trigger Utility visually displays the set of variables and automatically encodes a set of logic loops to analyze the data. A network engineer is therefore liberated from writing scripts for network data analysis. A system is provided to run in debugging mode for visually debugging the automatically generated programs.