[Xymon] Broken custom graphs on trends page

[Ralph Mitchell]

Did you ever get any response on this broken graph issue?  I'm seeing the
same thing now.

I have a system with 11 file systems. Multi-graph shows them in sets of 3,
except for the last 2, which don't show at all.  When I view the page
source, I can see that the link says first=10&count=3. I figure that must
be breaking the graph generator because there are only 2 more graphs to
show.

This is stock 4.3.7, btw.  I'll dig into the code later and see if I can
see why the math miscounts.

Ralph Mitchell
On Mar 15, 2012 11:14 PM, "Jeremy Laidman" <jlaidman at rebel-it.com.au> wrote:

> Xymonsters
>
> I'm looking for a way forward on the "broken multiple graphs" problem
> that I'm experiencing.  Excuse the long post; it's part brainstorming,
> and part context-setting.
>
> For a while there have been some discussion on the list about how
> custom graphs can get displayed incorrectly as if they're multi-graph
> when they're not.  (I think I'm using the correct term "multi-graph"
> here.)  Xymon works out that there are enough RRD files to fill more
> than one graph, and shows several graphs, each with a different
> "first" parameter.  For me, in many cases all of the lines fit on one
> graph, and so the other graphs show as a broken image icon.
>
> A work-around seems to be to explicitly show "<!-- linecount=N>" to
> define how many lines should be expected on a set of graphs.  I've
> done this in my devmon templates to prevent the broken graphs.
>
> However, this work-around is only available for custom graphs that
> create their own status webpage using HTML (in which the "<!--
> linecount=N>" tag can be included) and send them to Xymon using a
> "status" message.
>
> I have some collectors that send their data to Xymon using "data"
> messages, because I don't want to grow my Xymon display too wide, with
> a bunch of dots that can only ever be green.  So my graphs show up in
> the trends column, which is exactly where I want them.  But because I
> can't add a "linecount" anywhere, I get broken graphs.
>
> I really don't think I'm doing anything out of the ordinary here, and
> certainly not deviating from the documentation.  I've scoured doco,
> mailing list, and even code to find out what can be done to work
> around this problem.  Finally, I've come to the conclusion that the
> Xymon code is simply unable to work out how many graphs to show in all
> situations, and its heuristics are not working sometimes.  This is the
> only bit of my Xymon installation that is tarnishing its reputation
> here, meaning that it doesn't compare favourably with other products,
> so I'd really like to get this fixed somehow.  But I'm not sure what
> to do about it.  If I'm simply doing something wrong, then please let
> me know, and ignore the rest of this post.
>
> So, what am I asking for?  There might be a way to get Xymon to work
> out the graph linecount more universally, perhaps at the expense of
> more code complexity, compatibility, CPU cycles or disk I/O (I think
> the some code comments describe an intent to avoid scanning the
> directory).  But even so, I think what I'd like to have is a way of
> overriding the heuristics other than the "linecount" hack.  But what's
> the best way to do this?  I'm willing to cut code to get this fixed,
> but my effort should be inline with the future of Xymon, as well as
> having maximal usefulness to others.  It also needs to not break the
> existing heuristics used for the standard graphs (disk, inode,
> if_load, etc).
>
> One idea is that I could add a "LINECOUNT" keyword into the graphs.cfg
> file, something like this:
>
>  [bindstats]
>      TITLE DNS Queries and Responses
>      YAXIS per second
>      LINECOUNT 6
>      ...
>
> This would help with both data and status messages that are falling
> victim to this problem.
>
> It also occurs to me that the multi-graph code doesn't seem (to me) to
> make sense for graph definitions that don't have @RRDIDX@ type indexed
> filename lookups.  So perhaps the simplest thing would be to assume
> linecount is zero if FNPATTERN is not specified in the corresponding
> graph definition.
>
> Other ideas?
>
> Cheers
> Jeremy
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