[rrd-developers] Changing X-Axis behavior

[Francisco Perea]

Hi, 

I'm working with energy efficency. We take measures from energy consumption
and production at the same time. As an example say: 

Month	 Energy	Production 
               [KWh]	[Ton] 

march-2011 138480	2161680 

april-2011	 122880	2103370 

may-2011	 155280	2401320 

jun-2011	 157920	2537565 

jul-2011	 159600	2303359 

aug-2011	 177600	2811775 

An so on. The interesting graph in this time series is Energy vs.
Production. It's related to energy efficiency or in a general view just
efficiency. 

To keep thing simple, it's like a car. Better than average speed, shown in a
graph as the speed vs the time, it would be more interesting to know how
many miles or kilometers, the car makes with a gallon of fuel. Energy
efficency is related to that. Would need to create a graph that shows
gallons (Energy) per mile (production), and see how it behaves. All data are
measured as a time series, the periodic reading of energy (fuel) and at the
same time, miles traveled. 
In a WLAN network management efficiency graphs could be for example number
of users connected vs. traffic, or memory used against sent packets or drops
or lost packets or... 

RRDTool graphs ALWAYS have time as the X-axis. 
So, the idea is to 'upgrade' RRDTool to allow different data in X-Axis. 

Maybe options could be: 

- I was thinking to change the source code of RRDTool to allow diferent data
in X-Axis, not just time, leaving the rest of code as is. By this way the
database creation and upgrade will be the same but graph part will be
extended and it could use one database for Y-Axis and another for X-Axis
only and just only if they have the same delta time. 

- Maybe is easier to use a diferent software for display the data and keep
the rest of RDDTool software as is. This could be an 'addon' to RRDTool
using another graph library/software. This will allow many diferents
'flavors' of graph shapes as lines, dots, pies, 3d charts, scatter, radar,
etc. Hard thing will be to setup other library/software to keep RRDTool's
look & feel'. 

- Other option could be a full re-write of RRDTool including a graphs
software. With this option, existing RRDTool will do database work and
maths. Graphs sofware do the rest. 

Are there any other options? 
What do you think about this 'upgrade' to RRDTool? 

PD: Tobi suggested me to use D3 (http://mbostock.github.com/d3/).  I've been
reading about it, and seems to be a very powerful graphics library written
in Java and also very light

Francisco Perea 
Electrical engineer, MSc

PD: This post maybe is repeat 'cause I wasn't developers member and... sorry
for inconvenience, if any.

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