[Engine-devel] [UX] how to design a bar/line chart?

Tomas Jelinek tjelinek at redhat.com
Wed Nov 6 14:58:03 UTC 2013


Hi Einav,

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Einav Cohen" <ecohen at redhat.com>
> To: "Tomas Jelinek" <tjelinek at redhat.com>
> Cc: "engine-devel" <engine-devel at ovirt.org>, "Eldan Hildesheim" <ehildesh at redhat.com>, "info" <info at eldanet.com>,
> "Malini Rao" <mrao at redhat.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, November 6, 2013 3:26:15 PM
> Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] [UX] how to design a bar/line chart?
> 
> Hi Tomas,
> 
> Like Itamar, I think that a line chart is a better idea, and that a
> chart per monitored fact (rather than a combined chart) is better.

OK

> 
> > > the statistics readable enough. Maybe if you hover the chart it could pop
> > > up a bigger version of the chart? Or not needed?
> 
> this is a nice-to-have, I think, definitely not needed.

OK

> 
> > > - Would it be enough to have it in one color? Or should it be something
> > > like "the bigger the utilization the more red"?
> 
> question is what will happen when there are a lot of "jumps": let's say
> that the graph changes from 0% to 100% to 0% to 100% and so on... what
> will be painted red? the entire line, but only in the periods that it
> jumps to 100%? only the parts of line that are in 100%?
> maybe a single color is enough.

OK

> 
> I have another concern about this feature: currently, the GUI's most frequent
> refresh rate available is 5 seconds, which means that the line will "change"
> only every 5 seconds, which would be more noticeably slow when displayed in
> a form of a line chart (not even talking about lower frequencies).
> Moreover, I am not sure at what rate the VM statistics are pulled from VDSM,
> but if it is 10 seconds or 15 seconds, it means that the line in the GUI will
> be "flat" for every 2 reads / 3 reads, which is not so good, I think.
> 
> any thoughts around that?

Good point! AFAIK the VDSM is polled each 3 seconds for basic info (e.g. the resource
usage not included) and than every 5th poll (e.g. every 15 seconds) for full data
(with resource usage not included). This would indeed make the graph pretty useless.

Michal proposed to do some averages on the VDSM site from more frequent sampling and
send this average back to engine when polled - so we would display an average after each poll (15s).

I wonder if something like this is not already used on other places:
@Martin, do you know about something like this?


> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Itamar Heim" <iheim at redhat.com>
> > To: "Tomas Jelinek" <tjelinek at redhat.com>, "engine-devel"
> > <engine-devel at ovirt.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, November 5, 2013 10:10:34 AM
> > Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] [UX] how to design a bar/line chart?
> > 
> > On 11/05/2013 11:50 AM, Tomas Jelinek wrote:
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > There is a feature request [1] which aims to replace the resource
> > > utilization graphs (for example the cpu utilization from vm tab) by some
> > > which shows not only
> > > the actual percentage which is not so useful by some monitor graph.
> > >
> > > I have the following concerns:
> > > - I can think of a bar chart or a line chart and not sure what would be
> > > better.
> > > - Not sure if replacing the current chart with a bar/line chart would
> > > make
> > > the statistics readable enough. Maybe if you hover the chart it could pop
> > > up a bigger version of the chart? Or not needed?
> > > - Would it be enough to have it in one color? Or should it be something
> > > like "the bigger the utilization the more red"?
> > >
> > > Please advise from the UX perspective. As soon as the final design will
> > > be
> > > a bit more clear I will provide a feature page.
> > >
> > > Thank you,
> > > Tomas
> > >
> > > [1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=803251
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Engine-devel mailing list
> > > Engine-devel at ovirt.org
> > > http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/engine-devel
> > >
> > 
> > a moving trend graph (just like fedora's system monitor for
> > cpu/ram/network) is what i have in mind. so a line chart.
> > you could have a single chart with different lines for cpu/ram/network,
> > or what seems to be more common, a chart per monitored fact
> > _______________________________________________
> > Engine-devel mailing list
> > Engine-devel at ovirt.org
> > http://lists.ovirt.org/mailman/listinfo/engine-devel
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 



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