[Linaro-validation] visualizing lab status

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

Hi all,

Thinking about various lab health and other issues has made me want to
see the current and historical state of a lab in a more sohpisticated
way.

I've messed around in inkscape a bit to show the sort of thing I mean --
can you guess what the attached image is meant to represent?  I hope
it's fairly obvious, or there isn't much point in all this.

To be clear:

 * each board gets a horizontal line
 * time increases along the x-axis
 * at a given moment, the line being narrow for a board indicates no job
   is running
 * a narrow green line means IDLE, a narrow grey line means OFFLINE
 * a wider line means a job is running, or alternatively jobs are
   represented by fatter blobs
 * a red blob is a job that did not complete
 * a green blob is a job that completed ok

Ideally, the view would support zooming and scrolling.

Mousing over a job should display a summary of the job, and clicking it
should go to the log page.

We could probably have a checkbox that would hide non-healthcheck jobs.

We might want a variant that has a line for each device type, and
somehow aggegrates the jobs running on different boards.  Not sure how
this would work though.

I think we are storing all the information we need to create this view
(in the DeviceStateTransition table).

Do you guys think we should create this view?  I would really like to
have it, but I don't have a clear intuition on how hard it would be.  I
think it would make sense to mostly implement it in js, using some kind
of js library.  I don't know of any library that would specifically help
(is there a name for this sort of visualization I can google for?) but
I'm sure it could be done with raphael (http://raphaeljs.com/) and maybe
d3 (http://mbostock.github.com/d3/) but I'm not really super up-to-date
on the latest whizzery in js visualization space.

Cheers,
mwh

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