Column order and accessibility of the 'info' column
We're finding the 'info' column to be very important to us, but are also finding it a little difficult to find in the web displays.
Since the number and titles of the columns displayed for each group vary, it is impossible to know which green diamond is the 'info' column without consulting the group-header. Is is difficult in a couple of cases:
- If there are many hosts in a group, it can be hard to do the row/column matching to click the correct 'info' button.
- If we use the 'find host/jump' function, the found host is at the top of the page and we must scroll up to find the header.
I can think of several ways to make this more usable:
- Use a unique icon (or icon set) for 'info'. Is 'info' ever be anything but green?
- Let me rename the 'info' column like we can the 'conn' column. If it were named ' info' it would always sort to the left.
- Let me specify an alternative column sort order for my pageset.
- Make the 'find/jump' option jump to the group rather than the host.
Can anyone suggest another way (which is already possible) I can use to improve the accessibility of the 'info' column?
-- Do things because you should, not just because you can.
John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska
On 17 January 2014 07:22, John Thurston <john.thurston at alaska.gov> wrote:
Can anyone suggest another way (which is already possible) I can use to improve the accessibility of the 'info' column?
Would it help to change the page type to vertical? That way the columns names are on the left and hostnames are on the top. Example:
http://www.xymon.com/xymon/vert/vert.html
J
Den 16.01.2014 21:22, John Thurston skrev:
We're finding the 'info' column to be very important to us, but are also finding it a little difficult to find in the web displays.
Since the number and titles of the columns displayed for each group vary, it is impossible to know which green diamond is the 'info' column without consulting the group-header. Is is difficult in a couple of cases: + If there are many hosts in a group, it can be hard to do the row/column matching to click the correct 'info' button. + If we use the 'find host/jump' function, the found host is at the top of the page and we must scroll up to find the header.
I can think of several ways to make this more usable: + Use a unique icon (or icon set) for 'info'. Is 'info' ever be anything but green?
I like the idea of a different icon for the info-column. Try this patch, it causes the info-column to use the "unknown.gif" icon which contains a question-mark. NB: You may have to patch with "--ignore-whitespace" in case tabs/spaces get messed up in copy-paste operation. Regards, Henrik Index: xymongen/pagegen.c =================================================================== --- xymongen/pagegen.c (revision 7347) +++ xymongen/pagegen.c (working copy) @@ -553,10 +553,12 @@ else if (reportstart == 0) { /* Standard webpage */ char *skin; + char *img = dotgiffilename(e->color, e->acked, e->oldage); if (strcmp(e->column->name, xgetenv("INFOCOLUMN")) == 0) { /* Show the host IP on the hint display of the "info" column */ htmlalttag = alttag(e->column->name, COL_GREEN, 0, 1, h->ip); + img = dotgiffilename(-1, 0, 0); } else { htmlalttag = alttag(e->column->name, e->color, e->acked, e->propagate, e->age); @@ -586,7 +588,7 @@ } fprintf(output, "<IMG SRC=\"%s/%s\" ALT=\"%s\" TITLE=\"%s\" HEIGHT=\"%s\" WIDTH=\"%s\" BORDER=0></A>", - skin, dotgiffilename(e->color, e->acked, e->oldage), + skin, img, htmlalttag, htmlalttag, xgetenv("DOTHEIGHT"), xgetenv("DOTWIDTH"));
On 1/17/2014 2:12 AM, henrik at hswn.dk wrote:
Den 16.01.2014 21:22, John Thurston skrev:
We're finding the 'info' column to be very important to us, but are also finding it a little difficult to find in the web displays.
Since the number and titles of the columns displayed for each group vary, it is impossible to know which green diamond is the 'info' column without consulting the group-header. Is is difficult in a couple of cases:
- If there are many hosts in a group, it can be hard to do the row/column matching to click the correct 'info' button.
- If we use the 'find host/jump' function, the found host is at the top of the page and we must scroll up to find the header.
I can think of several ways to make this more usable:
- Use a unique icon (or icon set) for 'info'. Is 'info' ever be anything but green?
I like the idea of a different icon for the info-column. Try this patch, it causes the info-column to use the "unknown.gif" icon which contains a question-mark.
Yes, this is helpful, and I have put it on my test instance to try it out. The yellow icons on every host are going to cause heartburn for some users, though.
I've tried querying the server for hostname.info and get no result. This makes me think that the 'info' test is handled differently from other tests. If I ask for xymondboard for host=hostname, however, 'info|green' is in the response. This makes it look like all other tests. That is a little odd.
If the 'info' test will always be 'green', is it possible to define a new 'color' of type 'info' for this test? dotgiffilename could be modified to handle the new type and map to an appropriately named gif. The state of the test could continue to be stored as 'green' but xymongen could translate it to 'info' when it determined it was working on INFOCOLUMN
{I should rtfm} As I typed that, I just realized what I'm looking at in the patch you supplied for xymongen. There _is_ already an environment variable named, INFOCOLUMN.
By setting: INFOCOLUMN="-info" I think I get behavior which meets my needs. The column will sort left, and the icon will be green.
Are there limits on what characters can be used in the column name? Do you foresee difficulties in your sort, search, or display routines caused by leading the column name with a hyphen?
Do things because you should, not just because you can.John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska
Den 17-01-2014 19:32, John Thurston skrev:
I like the idea of a different icon for the info-column. Try this patch, it causes the info-column to use the "unknown.gif" icon which contains a question-mark.
Yes, this is helpful, and I have put it on my test instance to try it out. The yellow icons on every host are going to cause heartburn for some users, though.
<grin>yes, that might be a problem. I have changed it for 4.3.14 so you can explicitly set an image-file to be used as the icon for info- and trends-columns.
I've tried querying the server for hostname.info and get no result. This makes me think that the 'info' test is handled differently from other tests. If I ask for xymondboard for host=hostname, however, 'info|green' is in the response. This makes it look like all other tests. That is a little odd.
They are special, they do not really exist in xymond, but are generated "on the fly" only for the xymondboard output.
By setting: INFOCOLUMN="-info" I think I get behavior which meets my needs. The column will sort left, and the icon will be green.
Are there limits on what characters can be used in the column name? Do you foresee difficulties in your sort, search, or display routines caused by leading the column name with a hyphen?
You should probably avoid characters that have special meaning in HTML, but other than those I don't foresee any problems.
Regards, Henrik
Hi all, Here are the icons I use in our Xymon installation. To use them, just copy the gifs in ~/server/www/gifs and change INFOCOLUMNGIF= and TRENDSCOLUMNGIF= values in ~/server/etc/xymonserver.cfg. No need of server reload. Regards, Mario De Chenno
Il giorno dom, 19/01/2014 alle 22.42 +0100, Henrik Størner ha scritto:
yes, that might be a problem. I have changed it for 4.3.14 so you can explicitly set an image-file to be used as the icon for info- and trends-columns.
I’ve also never cared for the columns being in alphabetical order. Is this configurable? Where do I define a custom column order?
Thank you.
Kris Springer
From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of Ing. Mario De Chenno Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2014 3:32 AM To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: Re: [Xymon] Column order and accessibility of the 'info' column
Hi all, Here are the icons I use in our Xymon installation. To use them, just copy the gifs in ~/server/www/gifs and change INFOCOLUMNGIF= and TRENDSCOLUMNGIF= values in ~/server/etc/xymonserver.cfg. No need of server reload. Regards, Mario De Chenno
Il giorno dom, 19/01/2014 alle 22.42 +0100, Henrik Størner ha scritto:
yes, that might be a problem. I have changed it for 4.3.14 so you can explicitly set an image-file to be used as the icon for info- and trends-columns.
We use border framing on the rows/columns as used in the old Big Brother - makes it a lot easier to follow a column/row for us that are aging and becoming visually impaired. Also have the code modified to only alter the background color outside of the tables to the overall state color. Found that with shrunk displays that the background state color can impinge into the icon area and can make it difficult to make out the icon colors. We keep the table background black which seems to work best for distinguishing all the icon colors.
The drawback on this is that you are chewing up some additional web display real estate to support the borders. So it may be a space issue if you have a large number of host rows and/or columns that are already consuming all the display real estate.
If you are interested, I can send you the modifications to pagegen.c
-----Original Message----- From: Xymon [mailto:xymon-bounces at xymon.com] On Behalf Of John Thurston Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 3:23 PM To: xymon at xymon.com Subject: [Xymon] Column order and accessibility of the 'info' column
We're finding the 'info' column to be very important to us, but are also finding it a little difficult to find in the web displays.
Since the number and titles of the columns displayed for each group vary, it is impossible to know which green diamond is the 'info' column without consulting the group-header. Is is difficult in a couple of cases:
- If there are many hosts in a group, it can be hard to do the row/column matching to click the correct 'info' button.
- If we use the 'find host/jump' function, the found host is at the top of the page and we must scroll up to find the header.
I can think of several ways to make this more usable:
- Use a unique icon (or icon set) for 'info'. Is 'info' ever be anything but green?
- Let me rename the 'info' column like we can the 'conn' column. If it were named ' info' it would always sort to the left.
- Let me specify an alternative column sort order for my pageset.
- Make the 'find/jump' option jump to the group rather than the host.
Can anyone suggest another way (which is already possible) I can use to improve the accessibility of the 'info' column?
-- Do things because you should, not just because you can.
John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska
Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
If you "hover" the mouse pointer over one of the colored dots you get a tooltip popup that tells you what column it is.
Ralph Mitchell
On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 3:22 PM, John Thurston <john.thurston at alaska.gov>wrote:
We're finding the 'info' column to be very important to us, but are also finding it a little difficult to find in the web displays.
Since the number and titles of the columns displayed for each group vary, it is impossible to know which green diamond is the 'info' column without consulting the group-header. Is is difficult in a couple of cases:
- If there are many hosts in a group, it can be hard to do the row/column matching to click the correct 'info' button.
- If we use the 'find host/jump' function, the found host is at the top of the page and we must scroll up to find the header.
I can think of several ways to make this more usable:
- Use a unique icon (or icon set) for 'info'. Is 'info' ever be anything but green?
- Let me rename the 'info' column like we can the 'conn' column. If it were named ' info' it would always sort to the left.
- Let me specify an alternative column sort order for my pageset.
- Make the 'find/jump' option jump to the group rather than the host.
Can anyone suggest another way (which is already possible) I can use to improve the accessibility of the 'info' column?
-- Do things because you should, not just because you can.
John Thurston 907-465-8591 John.Thurston at alaska.gov Enterprise Technology Services Department of Administration State of Alaska
Xymon mailing list Xymon at xymon.com http://lists.xymon.com/mailman/listinfo/xymon
participants (7)
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henrik＠hswn.dk
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jlaidman＠rebel-it.com.au
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john.thurston＠alaska.gov
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kspringer＠innovateteam.com
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mario.dechenno＠unina2.it
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Mark.Deiss＠xerox.com
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ralphmitchell＠gmail.com