[drraw-users] documentation, FAQ, wiki.. (Was: Trying to create a Grouped Dashboard with Templates Style Regex)

[Eric Law]

Good enough for display purposes yes....
but my job is to provide the tools to the customer so they can make
their own dashboards.

Thus far, I've been able to use drraw to provide the odd-ball cases
they are asking for without having to modify code or hard-code HTML
(like most of the more technical of my customers already do... now if
they would just use proper APIs instead of deep linking to TEMP
data!).

Agreed RRD knowledge is a must (we usually WANT access to RPN after all).

Examples of features in drraw that other tools lack:
  re-sort the order of datasources
  display min/max/ave in the legend
  auto-include the 'source' of the data in the graph title
  select mutiple targets (RRD files) via regex (or all), rather than
manually add them.
  expose RAW RPN functions to the user (for calculating ratios for example)

It might be nice to have 'canned' week-over-week functionality, but it
likely doable via some kind of recipe.  I've come across use of a
TREND feature in RRDTool too, so that would be nice to expose (might
only be development or beta or somesuch).

Folks where I work would love to see some kind of holt+winters
forecasting too, but it's a real bear to modify the RRDs to support
those.  But that has little to do with drraw (unless you have
Holt+Winters RRAs within your RRDs.... which I dont).

Integration with cricket datasource names would be nice too... right
now everything is 'ds0,ds1,ds2', so I have to manually map them.



On 12/19/06, Christophe Kalt <kalt at taranis.org> wrote:
> On Dec 19, Eric Law wrote:
> | I'll try to make note of the 'mis-conceptions' I come across and any
> | difficulties I encounter.
>
> That'd be very useful :-)
>
> | Let it be known, however, that no other tool allows me to construct
> | dashboards with the power of drraw.cgi.  Most work in this arena
> | favors simplifying your options (thus limiting what you can do) versus
> | actually making it easier to create dashboards.
>
> It's always good to hear.  I haven't looked at anything else
> since i started working on drraw, 4 years ago, so i have no
> real idea what's out there these days.
>
> | Drraw.cgi is not so simple I can put it in front of customers, but
> | it's leagues beyond what I have in any other case (which is lots of
> | custom stuff on top or next to cricket).
>
> Should be simple enough to show already-made graphs, templates
> and dashboards, no?
> Definitely not simple when it comes to editing any of the
> above.  RRDtool knowledge is a must, knowledge of the data you
> have and how it's spread in the RRD files is also quite
> useful.  Dashboards are overly complex, but as you hinted
> above, i'm not sure much can be done about this (except better
> documentation) without limiting what can be done.
> It's been a while since i've done any real editing work with
> drraw, and *i* have forgotten how things work.  I had to read
> the doc to answer your earlier posts.  (But then again, that's
> always why i write docs, to have the luxury to forget!)
> Granted, it's much easier for me to make sense of things, and
> remember than it is for a newcomer :-)
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