Sexy Swoopy Graphs

Zenoss-1.1 has a bunch of new features and all are cool and powerful. You can check out the release notes for more details. While I love all the features I think the most sexy one by far are the swoopy rrdtool graphs!

A while ago I created ticket #281 that basically said make cool graph zooming like Cacti. Ian McCracken was up to the challenge and got to work. He looked at it and said “wouldn’t it be cool to scroll the graph like google maps?” I said “na that would be lame…”, just kidding! It turned out to be hard to scroll the graph smoothly with a mouse drag like a google maps due to the need for x/y-axis recalculation. Instead we added scroll buttons which move the x-axis forward or back in time.

We also allow zooming both in and out. If you click on a section of the graph and you are in zoom in mode it will center the graph on the click point and zoom in. Likewise zoom out will pull back centering on the point clicked.

Now we live in a modern world where full page reloads must be considered lame! So of course all scrolling and zooming happens via AJAX.

In Zenoss we are often displaying many graphs of with different data on the same page. Now all this navigation is cool but don’t you want all graphs to scroll at the same time? You want it, you got it, graph navigation can be linked in which case all graphs move in parallel.

Of course we maintain the standard view by date range (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly). There is even a reset button to take you back to the default starting point based on the current date range.

Here is a screen shot of a graph with the navigation buttons.

Hope you enjoy the new swoopy graphs!

-EAD