Data-browse feature

[clarfonthey]

Right now, facette is very nice if you've already defined the graphs you want to see, but personally, I'd like to just go through all the metrics and view them individually so I can decide what data I even have to decide what graphs to add to my collections.

Really, there isn't a way to do this at all and it makes starting to use the software incredibly complicated.

Right now I've defined a series of collectd metrics and want to view graphs of them. I haven't completely decided what graphs are going to be the most useful for me to pay attention to, but right now I can't even look at the data by themselves without going through a few different forms to make this happen, even though access to these metrics requires one step (configuring an origin).

Like, it seems like you've got the right idea for showing dashboards, but nowhere near what you need in order to create them. To me, the data lifecycle is:

1. Collect data
2. View data
3. Play with data
4. Monitor data
5. Determine what data is missing/most important
6. Go back to step 1

Obviously, step 1 is done through an external program, and the connection to the remaining steps is through an origin in facette. And, steps 5-6 are mostly done by the user thinking about the information they gathered from the previous steps. So, really, what we're missing is 2-3, as 4 is already done very well through the beautiful rendering of the graphs themselves.

These could easily be done by adding a data-browse tool, which essentially means being able to render graphs with generic settings (e.g. I click on a metric and it shows me a graph, maybe potentially checkbox-selecting multiple metrics to show them all on the same graph) so that I can just look at the data I have.

Here, I should be able to mess with the graph settings until I'm satisfied, then click "done" and plop that graph into a collection.

Right now, the software basically expects me to have planned how to deal with all of my data before even opening it, which I find incredibly unrealistic. Having to click through so many settings in order to even see my data just doesn't make sense to me, because although it's unlikely that I'll want to view the raw data by itself most of the time, seeing it is very important for this initial step.

[vbatoufflet]

Hi @clarfon,

You're right, starting with Facette might me a little bit complicated.

I'm currently working on the future version of Facette (a major rewrite of both back-end and front-end parts), and this version comes with, among other things, the ability to preview series and create a chart from that preview selection:

This version is still a work in progress and not usable at the moment, but I plan to start merging the changes soon in the public repository.

I hope it'll respond the issue to raised here 😄

[clarfonthey]

That looks awesome from what I can see here, so I'll let you know once I can try it out for myself. :)