Managing and creating complex custom graphs is a pain

kokkers · Post by **kokkers** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 11:35 am

Fellow Cacti users and developers,

I am dropping in wanting to share a Cacti experience.

Creating and maintaining complex graphs currently takes far too much time and manual labour.

To give an example here's one of our graphs:
http://kokkers.gotdns.com/cacti/example.jpg

This shows the cumulative bandwidth for various windows media publishingpoints on 2 of our servers. We have now upgraded the cluster from 2 to 4 servers and need to alter the existing graph...

I think you can feel my pain

Re-ordering graph items is a bad dream and having to add 80 more items using your mouse a nightmare...

It would be such a great feature if the graph management could be done text based. Do some massive copy pasting and fly through the paramaters. Cacti graph management was just not designed to handle these kind of graphs and is seriously limited I think.

I know of a few commercial products that have their own language for creating graphs, storing the required text in CVS/SVN so changes are easily monitored and reverted in case of an error. Another department Cacti is lacking in, make a mistake and you either do all the work again or restore something from backup...

How are other people handling complex graphs?

Post by **TheWitness** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 2:32 pm

Would Drag-n-Drop help there? By the way, that graph is the Bomb!

TheWitness

Post by **TheWitness** » Tue Mar 17, 2009 2:35 pm

I like the idea of scripting the graph creation process. There is no reason that can not be done for Cacti. I would be a nice plugin, and unlike Aggregate, you would not have to store the information in the tables, just have the plugin generate everything on the fly and store the meta information.

Boy, if I had more free time....

TheWitness

kokkers · Post by **kokkers** » Wed Mar 18, 2009 3:57 am

Drag and drop might make things a bit easier.
This would replace clicking and tracking a certain item 79 times by a simple drag and drop.

Drag and drop would make for a nice feature but it would be no solution to making complex graphs managable.

Post by **gandalf** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 3:08 pm

Still I do not see why AGGREGATE couldn't get at least very close to this.
But yes, using some code to pout your graph togeteher would cover more options. But I fear that handling this code would be more complex than "clicking things together".
Regarding the d&d feature, I'm quite positive that Andreas already supplied some code regarding this. But I have been out of business for some time, so don't flame me.
Reinhard

Post by **TheWitness** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 3:57 pm

I need some lunch and dinner. So, flaming is not on my mind. However, when it comes to dynamic content, a plugin would be appropriate. For example. Say (and in one of my undisclosed plugins it is), that I maintain averages and all sort's of wild statistics about things that I know are in RRDfiles, and I know the name of the RRDfile, and it's DS'.

Let's say then, I want to see, I don't know, the switch CPU graphs for the devices of interfaces with the top 10 errors (I'm not disclusing what I would actually do), and then wanted to create two aggregate graphs. The first of all errors and the second showing a stack of all CPU averages, that would be hard to do with aggregate since the top 10 may change from day to day.

That's why I want to do this, but it has nothing to do about CPU or Errors

TheWitness

Post by **gandalf** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 4:08 pm

Yep, this is an approach of sth like a "dynamic aggregate", where the graphs/files to be aggregated are based on sth like a regexp/filter/top 10 and stuff.
One of my colleagues already asked me out for such a feature, you know.
Reinhard

Larry, btb, I was not under the opinion that you would flame me

ben_c · Post by **ben_c** » Thu Mar 19, 2009 5:29 pm

Agreed on both counts. I have some large aggregate graphs and if I want to reorder items, I have to click through so much pain to get it displaying and I need.

And also agree on the backups. I basically have a cronjob that dumps the cacti sql db every hour just in case I need to restore due to breaking something!

Post by **gandalf** » Sun Mar 22, 2009 4:18 am

BTB: due to this discussion, I implemented drag&drop for graph (template) item reordering yesterday; but it's for 088.
This will NOT make the "dynamic aggregate" meaningless, I know.
It's just to show that we are able to react
Reinhard

kokkers · Post by **kokkers** » Mon Mar 23, 2009 2:51 pm

Thanks a million Gandalf, this stuff is very much appreciated!

Mentioning implementing 'drag & drop' between the lines like it is something you do before your morning coffee earns some respect.

Looking forward to taking it for a spin!

Post by **gandalf** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 1:58 pm

We always are looking forward to users that try out our latest stuff. So please feel free to download the current SVN to a test box and try this new feature. Comment when done.
Still, we are looking to more powerful DnD stuff (working with a dutch developer of a jQuery plugin, btb) to allow more moving blocks of items (e.g. a graph line AND all related GPRINTs).
088 will be great!
Reinhard

kokkers · Post by **kokkers** » Thu Mar 26, 2009 4:09 pm

Not only does it drag and drop, the implementation is smooth and crisp.
I really like the idea of 'advanced drag and drop' where the user can move an entire line, area or stack with all corresponding GPRINT's.

I missed a few Cacti version and was pleasantly surprised by the new look & feel. Nice to see you guys are still making a lot of progress and to see alot of the features mature.

Managing and creating complex custom graphs is a pain

Managing and creating complex custom graphs is a pain

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