DASHBOARD Disk Activity widget

Tex1954 · December 8, 2021, 3:56am

Okay, I’ve noticed something that I think can be improved or implemented as an option with the disk activity widget.

Keep in mind I suspect a majority of users use some sort of RAID in their system.
Also think about what data is actually useful to know when testing things internally.

While the top graphic portion is impressive, it is also somewhat less than optimal because it is showing individual disk activity; BUT, there is no way to fix a color to any disk. The disks and colors associated with them jump all over the place.

When transferring to/from a RAID setup, that lack of fixed color association is frustrating. In addition, I would rather get better and easier to understand POOL and/or RAID information. Possibly we could use check boxes for source information selection? We could then select our RAID disks individually to be combined as one.

Lastly, the throughput display on the bottom and the various selections in the scroll box are kind of small and not 100% understood by me. I would rather see something akin to a pool or raid selection option possibly combined with disk check box selection mentioned above.

Just my two cents and half a cup of tea…

(Is it possible for someone to program their own widget???)

Cheers everyone!

phillxnet · December 10, 2021, 10:58am

@Tex1954 Thanks for the feedback.
Yes our Dashboard has had very little attention since it was completely re-written by @Flyer many years ago. But it has, since then, received an additional widget, via @sfranzen (see later for details):
Re:

Yes, of course. The directory in the source to look at for the view part is here:

Your suggestions re raid drive flagging within the disk section could introduce some confusion, but as always the proof is in the pudding/pie. So do dive in and see what you can come up with. The disk’s widget is in that same directory here:

rockstor-core/disk_utilization.js at master · rockstor/rockstor-core · GitHub

These views gain their input by connecting to the ‘feeds’ from:

github.com

rockstor/rockstor-core/blob/master/src/rockstor/smart_manager/data_collector.py

"""
Copyright (c) 2012-2021 RockStor, Inc. <http://rockstor.com>
This file is part of RockStor.

RockStor is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License,
or (at your option) any later version.

RockStor is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
"""

# TODO: Let's deprecate gevent in favor of django channels and we won't need
# monkey patching and flake8 exceptions.

This file has been truncated. show original

And specific to the disk widget we have class DisksWidgetNamespace(RockstorIO):
and internal to that the ‘engine’ is here:

github.com

rockstor/rockstor-core/blob/master/src/rockstor/smart_manager/data_collector.py#L595-L611


      
          def send_top_disks(self):
              def disk_stats(prev_stats):
          
          
        disks_stats = []
                  # invoke body of disk_stats with empty cur_stats
                  stats_file_path = "/proc/diskstats"
                  cur_stats = {}
                  interval = 1
                  # TODO: Consider refactoring the following to use Disk.temp_name or
                  # TODO: building byid_disk_map from the same. Ideally we would have
                  # TODO: performance testing in place prior to this move.
                  # Build a list of our db's disk names, now in by-id type format.
                  disks = [d.name for d in Disk.objects.all()]
                  # /proc/diskstats has lines of the following form:
                  #  8      64 sde 1034 0 9136 702 0 0 0 0 0 548 702
                  #  8      65 sde1 336 0 2688 223 0 0 0 0 0 223 223
                  with open(stats_file_path) as stats_file:

As you can see we simply parse /proc/diskstats

There is some awarness of larger elements but not much. Hence it seeming disconnected from other stuff; such as pools and raid. The concern is that adding too much complexity, and pulling from too many models may make the display unworkable slow. But again a proof of concept may be all we need to see here.

As to the more recent addition, post @Flyer’s major contribution in this area we have @sfranzen’s contribution/addition:
See forum thread/post:

and commit:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/commit/b0bbebecea36fd9c979adec25b9068e0bc2835fa#diff-3ec8a984c40e61a1d4b8d1d57bcd7871d1374c3ee54371ce69c4bb4b7f737d98
via pr:
https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/pull/1426

As always pull requests welcome and we have the following recently updated doc section for how to get a development environment setup ready:

Community contributions → developer section.
https://rockstor.com/docs/contribute/contribute.html#developers

But our dashboard is likely to remain fairly basic given there are projects solely focused on such things. Have you for instance tried out our netdata Rock-on. You might like that.

Hope that helps.

Tex1954 · December 11, 2021, 1:03pm

Thanks for the input! I see visions of yet another system build in my future.