Forum Discussion

Anthony_Coleman's avatar
8 years ago

Ability to assign legends to advanced graphs without using globs

I had spoken with Christopher via live chat earlier this afternoon, inquiring about our legends becoming needlessly cluttered and hard-to-read despite having specified custom legends.

This effect was apparently semi-recent, as a majority of our graphs (all advanced on dashboards for the most part) still have this clean labeling.  However, upon having to add or modify a datapoint, and keeping these legends clean and easy-to-read resulted in the newly-updated graph reflecting all 3 globs ##datasource##, ##instance##, and ##hostname##

Here is a graph that we have in one of our many dashboards that is displaying that it was once possible:

This is more than adequate as it is a single host, with several datapoints reflected in it, hence the advanced graph (some even aggregate multiple servers into a single line for each of the indicated items in the legend.  and we are aggregating those purposefully to make it even easier to read)

Here is what we are now seeing on our newly updated (and newly created) graphs:

This behavior is excessive, and we, on most all of our graphs in this portal, purposefully remove all glob tags, as we do not need them.

I am unaware of which post Christopher had pulled this information from, but he did pass along the following information:

Quote

"If you use an advanced graph, which supports glob, the expectation is you use globs, so it has to use a token to show what the glob is graphing. If you don't use a token, it puts in all 3 ##datasource## ## instance## ## host##
You will have to use at least one or use a simple graph."

 

This excerpt tells me that this is a conscious decision.  As briefly explained above, we neither need, or want any of those globs in our legends, as they are all redundant with the information already provided within the graph.  I understand that in a "mostly" scenario people will want to use one or multiple, and providing it as a default (as it always has been) in the legends is fine.  However, when one specifies to explicitly use  / say something else, it should not be forcing usage upon us.  This is particularly an issue because several people utilizing these dashboards are viewing on mobile, and with these extra additions in the legend, and lengthening the tooltips is a hassle to our users as it's hiding other information when they just wanted a simple explanation.

  • Hi Anthony - This was an unfortunate byproduct of us merging the simple custom graph and advanced custom graph widgets of yore.  While we auto insert those tokens presently, that isn't our goal long term.  We're working through a few other configuration options for that widget, and will address the legend issue at the same time.

  • As a workaround, could we get the ##INSTANCE## glob (or a similar one to retain the existing info) so that it shows only the actual instance name? E.g. in NetApp-land, "##INSTANCE## for any of the volume-level datasources will show SVM/Volume instead of just Volume.