accurate timestamp marks in graphs

[vins]

i come from cricket-monitoring world. an ancient perl frontend to rrd with many features which modern monitoring tools don't reach (yet).

zabbix graphs are the best graphs i've seen since cricket, but imho there's a lack of "visual comfort", particularly regarding timestamps. it's a bit hard to track graphs with timestamp marks such as "02.15 03:34", next "08:50", "14:24", "19:49" and "02.16 01:15". it seems timestamps are calculated from grid marks instead the other way round (first we calc timestamps, then we calc the grid marks to match tstamps).

besides, there's another feature in cricket graphs called "zerotimes": in graphs with period below a week, cricket draws a red vertical line to mark each day change (i.e. 00h00m00s), in graphs below a month, cricket draws a line each monday at 0:00h. in graphs below a year, cricket draws a line each first day of the month, and so.

i think these features would avoid misunderstandings, ease troubleshooting tasks, and in summary, they'd improve zabbix significantly

[Lovespider]

I really would like to have timestamps (vertical lines) on hours (or weeks or months) instead of being calculated at the time the graph is generated.
I fully quote 'vins'.

[richlv]

that sounds like a quite nice possible improvement. would you mind writing up a design specification (your initial post is already quite specific, but exact desired behaviour would be perfect )
note, all i can do is add it to the wishlist, so maybe you can't be bothered.

[vins]

I've already tried to implement it by myself, but code regarding scrollbar and graphs is a bit cryptic and warnings like "Don't forget sync code with C !!!" and "Do not change till you fully understand what you are doing" persuaded me to give up

i don't know the current exact flow to process a graph, but it looks like each cell in the grid is width-fixed and timestamps are generated from this. for example:

let's suppose we have a 7days period graph to draw in a 700px width chart. trivial logic says we should draw a day each 100px. thus, we'd have a timestamp mark per day, so grid cells should be 1day-multiple (6hours,12hours,24hours,etc).

actually, we have, however, fixed-width "grid squares" and the approach goes to "we have a 700px width chart and there's room for -exactly- 17 cells" and this is fixed regardless we have a scrollbar period of 1, 3 or 7 days, weeks or months. consecuently, timestamp marks take "non-accurate" values.

graphs are best viewed when their cells are "human scaled". you'll agree with me that it's very ugly to have a graph where each square cell means "1 hour, 41 minutes and 27 seconds".

[vins]

zero times are just "visual hints". they're vertical red lines to mark day beginning in daily graphs, monday 0:00 in weekly graphs, 1st of the month at 0:00 in monthly graphs and so.

[Alexei]

Thank you for the suggestions. Actually we should have been implemented this long ago, I like it. If we are lucky, the functionality may be even implemented in 1.6.x!

[JeffS]

This is such a great idea, I have to bump it.

[vins]

almost three years later... that's great!