Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish Commentshttps://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish?atomcommentsDWiki2022-06-18T13:52:21ZRecent comments in Chris's Wiki :: blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish.By dozzie on /blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWishtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish:78126199de3a3d845eb624134abbb57ceb68ce69dozzie<div class="wikitext"><blockquote><p>As far as Grafana being a GUI builder goes, I think being a GUI builder is important and perhaps essential to its success, because it lets people start with it easily.</p>
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<p>Of course it's popular because it's a graphical GUI builder. My point was something different: it's a <em>poor</em> GUI builder, and how poor it is is clearly visible when you compare it with just about any other GUI builder, or even GUI toolkits.</p>
</div>2022-06-18T13:52:21ZBy Chris Siebenmann on /blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWishtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish:ce8f587063f581ab9dadfdd50d72c29c054fa320Chris Siebenmann<div class="wikitext"><p>Because the text box/info box is accessible in general, I tend to use it
to explain to viewers what the particular panel is showing and what its
limitations are, rather than any sort of deep dive on how the panel is
put together (which is only interesting to people editing it, ie me).</p>
<p>(The text box isn't also directly co-located with eg queries, which
means I would have to go back and forth when commenting and updating
comments as queries update.)</p>
<p>As far as Grafana being a GUI builder goes, I think being a GUI builder
is important and perhaps essential to its success, because it lets
people start with it easily. Honestly, if I'd had to define panels and
dashboards in text format from the start (when I didn't know Grafana and
didn't know what we wanted), I'm not sure I'd have persisted with it.
But Grafana could have a reasonable text-based serialization or storage
format that allowed for comments, such as YAML, so you could start out
in the GUI builder and then transition to editing things through text.</p>
<p>(Such text based editing would make certain sorts of dashboard and panel
building a lot easier, because there can be a lot of repetition and fine
detail that's easier to express and check in text than through the GUI.)</p>
</div>2022-06-17T20:17:10ZBy hdhoang on /blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWishtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish:b672da7b8c86c809ebeceb0f05202664b2a94767hdhoang<div class="wikitext"><p>we stuff such comment in panel info textbox & more links there too. it's an (i) icon on panels' top-left corner.</p>
<p>for promql specifically, grafana 8.5 accepts & highlights in-line #-comment correctly. But i'm not sure if it's accessible to viewers (even if through panel json dump). the info icon is more accessible. at least future editors can get it when they want to edit</p>
</div>2022-06-17T12:56:39ZBy dozzie on /blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWishtag:CSpace:blog/sysadmin/GrafanaCommentsWish:f55120239b9c3e96e11397e180e20ceccafa4c1fdozzie<div class="wikitext"><p>If you think about it, Grafana is a GUI builder, like Borland Delphi, just dedicated to dashboards. If you approach from this perspective, it's clear how awful Grafana is at being a GUI builder, and it's also clear how it could work if you could define a dashboard as a program (like in Tcl/Tk, Java AWT/Swing, GTK+, Qt, and so on) or declaratively (XML definitions in gDesklets; and Grafana's JSON is not a good example of this, because it's just a dump of all options of used widgets and you're not really meant to use write JSON directly).</p>
<p>With this, it's no wonder that a good place for comments and remarks could be found, but Grafana Labs never made one (or never made one easily accessible).</p>
</div>2022-06-17T12:07:04Z