improvements on the graphic engine

[dervitx]

hi, ladies. After a long parenthesis, I'm going to continue, with the improvements on the graph engine of pandora, i.e., the code that produces all the graphs you can see in the pandora console.

   Before begining to code, I would like to ask you, developers and users, which features you think that should be improved/created/researched regarding the pandora's graph engine.

   Please, answer to this post with your ideas, complains, experiences, etc.

   Actually, the main goals of this branch of development are be:

- to eliminate the jpgraph library dependences. These libraries are great, but they have licence issues. As you know, we aim to the PEAR:Image_graph libraries now as a possible candidate (we accept other suggestions)

- we have begun to use the cross-browser javascript libraries to enhance the interactivity with the graphs (float menus, parameters like zoom, resolution, etc)

- we have also begun to improve the performance of the engine. Now, all the graphs are precalculated in memory tables in the database, and this data is re-used when possible.

- events of a module can be represented as coloured lines in the graphs

- graphs for generic_data_string (statistics)

- ...  ideas???

[Sancho Lerena]

You know that old idea about merge different sources in the same graph. Will be interesting to have a "meeting" (real or virtual) to define new paths of development for 1.3 and 2.0 versions, just when 1.2 version will be finished (this month??).

[allentiak]

I would like to see the max, min and avg values of monitor by hour (or 30 minutes) and day in a historical way (since the agent started to send data). This could make possible reports like "From Monday to Friday, the CPU Use is high (from 8h to 13h and from 17h to 20h). The rest of the time is practically null.

[daggett]

The best thing to improve, from my point of view is clearly the speed when generating a graph on 1 week or even worse on 1 month. This can take more than 20seconds on a Pentium4 3GHz...

Generate an empty graph even if there is no data, because for now (v1.2) it's only displaying nothing: the graph is not generated, so the web browser is displaying a "missing image" icon. So we don't know why the image was not found (no data? no php-jpgraph? wrong path to image?) and it's uneasy for debug.

Be able to specify a unit like MB or Bytes or MHz or anything else, to be displayed on the axis.
When graphing BIG numbers, be able to display human readable numbers (100M instead of 100000000) for the Y-axis values.

Well in fact something like RRD-Graph (from RRD-Tools) would be perfect !

I'm planning to add a page that displays permanently some graphs from preselected data to keep them always on sight, updated every 5 minutes, and when an alarm is triggered, display the associated graph.
In fact it's a rotating display of every selected modules, plus all the modules that have active alarms are constantly displayed and updated.
It makes many graphs to be generated constantly, so an improvement in graph generation speed and CPU consumption will be appreciated.

well that's kind of all our wishes! ;)
bye for now
Dag