Discrete panel plugin roadmap

[psmt]

hi @ryantxu,
I am using the discrete panel a lot and I think it is a very usefull panel type for many Grafana users. I don’t want to be rude, but I was wondering what the status/roadmap is for this plugin? I notice there’s some very usefull feature requests and other open issues, but not a lot of progress anymore…
Could you give us an update on this project? Are you counting on extra contributers? Other plans with this discrete panel type?

kind regards
Pascal

[marcusolsson]

Not an answer to your question, but you might be interested to know that Grafana 8.0 will introduce a built-in Timeline panel, similar to the Discrete panel.

What's new in Grafana v8.0

[psmt]

thanks, that is very usefull information. I did a quick test, and this built-in time panel seems to have the exact same purpose as the discrete panel (although still basic compared to the discrete panel). but this means something is going on around this theme

[ryantxu]

Hi @psmt – yes in grafana 8, there is a new “state timeline” panel that aims to support the same use case as the discrete. It is not yet a 1:1 replacement, but the goal is that it will be. Can I ask which features specifically exist in discrete you would like to see?

[psmt]

Hi @ryantxu, this discrete panel is such a powerfull and usefull visualisation tool, I could only assume that the plan was to integrate this as a standard panel in Grafana. So great job!
Anyhow, this is my input on the features I find very usefull:

• hover tooltip (including msg,from,to,duration)

• value mapping

• color mapping: mainly 2 scenario’s:

  • limited amount of different “states” (typical example: state of a machine: running, stopped,idle,…) → manual color mapping (you want green for running state )
  • lots of different “states/events” (typical example: stop reasons for the same machine → auto color

this last case was the reason why I started this thread. I was missing the possibility to assign a specific color to a group of stop reasons. The use of regex inside the color mapping would 've helped me a lot I think.

I’ve seen that in the new built-in panel there’s also a single color option. I think this will also be very usefull .
Possible scenario: I sometimes use annotations to show events, but if you zoom out then these annotation lines become very overwhelming and taking over the whole screen. 1 single color state timeline panel with shared crosshair enabled could be a very nice alternative.

[ryantxu]

Regex for value mapping is the only thing you list that was not on our TODO list – but that seems like a good thing to add

The pieces I am not sure about are the text styles and legend % calculations.

But in general the goal is to make this a core out-of-the-box feature.

[psmt]

About the percentage calculations. Again very usefull option in my opinion but it’s subject to remarks by the users. They often make the total sum of percentages and check if it is really 100%, which is not the case and is due to the way it works with querying the data I suppose.

More in general it would be great to have a general solution to query 1 extra event before the “from” range. This would make the panel look much more consistent.
I did some testing by creating a second (influxdb) query (select last(value) from measurement where time < {$__from}) and using a transformation to merge the data. Seemed ok for most cases but doesn’t feel right.

[ivolemm]

Hi @ryantxu,
In addition to psmt a very useful feature I’d like to see is some import tool for value mapping. Sometimes we have up to 100 values to map to a short description to make the panel readable for users.
Most easy for us would be to import e.g. a xlsx with 2 columns: value, description