[Linaro-validation] visualizing lab status

[Michael Hudson-Doyle]

On Tue, 03 Apr 2012 22:18:34 -0500, Andy Doan <andy.doan at linaro.org> wrote:
> On 4/3/12 7:50 PM, Michael Hudson-Doyle wrote:
> > 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.
> 
> The JS Flot library has zoom/scroll support (but see comments below)
> 
> <snip>
> > 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 this would be valuable, but I'd like to hear ideas about how to 
> aggregate the data up.

Yeah.  Needs thinking.

> <snip>
> > Do you guys think we should create this view?
> 
> I like it!
> 
> > 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.
> 
> I used Flot for the benchmark visuals. Flot claims a lot and has 
> different plug-ins. However, I found the plug-ins don't always work 
> together when you need to combine a couple. It also seems the main 
> community wasn't really accepting some fixes I'd think were needed. I'd 
> be happy to chat with you about more details, but it might not be the 
> right tool for this problem.

Flot seems to me to be oriented around drawing charts, which is not
quite what I want to do, sadly.  "Timelines"
e.g. http://www.simile-widgets.org/wiki/Timeline are close, but also not
quite there.

Cheers,
mwh