stapgraph thoughts

[David Smith <dsmith at redhat dot com>]

Tim,

Here are a few stapgraph thoughts I've had today while playing around
with it.

- On my system anyway, the stapgraph window always comes up needing to
be resized larger to actually see the entire graph.  Would it be
possible to have it come up at the correct size?

- Related to the last point, although you can resize the stapgraph
window, it doesn't really change the graph's dimensions.  Perhaps the
window could be made non-resizeable?

- According to the stapgraph manpage, you can do "%Title: title for the
whole graph".  Is this correct?  Your grapher.stp example uses "dataset
%Title: title for the whole graph".

If you have to specify a data set here, why?  If I'm understanding this
correctly, this isn't a title for the data set, but for the graph itself.

Note that the same thing may hold true for '%XAxisTitle', '%YAxisTitle',
and '%YMax'.  I haven't used those yet, but the grapher.stp example uses
a data set name there also.

Also note that the 'dataset' name in front of '%Title:' must be a valid
data set name, it can't just be dummy text.  I worked around this by
defining a fake data set just to use with %Title.

- Another 'title' thought.  Instead of overlaying the title on top of
the graph itself (which can obscure the graph), either reserve it a
space at the top or put it below the X axis on the graph.

- Here's something related to the last one.  The timestamps are also
displayed on top of the X axis, which tends to obscure low data values.
 Could you put the timestamps under the X axis? (Admittedly that could
obscure low negative data values, but I think that's a smaller problem.)

- With lots of data sets being graphed concurrently, it is easy to get
confused on what the graph actually means.  If you don't know that this
particular shade of red means X and that particular shade of blue means
Y, you can't see it from the graph itself.  Perhaps you could draw a
legend of some sort that maps data set names back to their associated
colors?

For bonus points: if the mouse hovers over a data point, a bubble could
pop up that displayed the data set name and data value at that point.

-- 
David Smith
dsmith@redhat.com
Red Hat
http://www.redhat.com
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