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How does this compare to something like Grafana? https://github.com/grafana/grafana https://github.com/grafana/grafana

jester23947 10y ago
I really like grafana
weego 10y ago
Can I just take a moment, and I apologise up front for singling you out for this one, to say how much I hate comments like this, even more that they get upvoted. There's always some arbitrary software mentioned that is often barely related even tangentially and expect someone else to reply with the info. If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that research is interesting enough YOU post it. Don't expect other people to do it for you, or worse, make it so that the creator of something that might not even be the one linking it feels like they have to justify why they open sourced something.
- joneholland 10y ago
  I don't think this is fair criticism. Grafana is an exact competitor to this, and as the market leader, it's only natural to be the benchmark.
- ausjke 10y ago
  no I like these short posts too, even though with more info it will be more helpful. Providing related links is still useful, it took me less than one minute to check out quickly. Thanks.
  - hacktothefuture 10y ago
    I agree with you! This is how I found VueJS when someone made a similar, tangentially related post which was essentially, "Yea but I like VueJS much better for reason x". It exposed me to something I didn't know about.
- dsjoerg 10y ago
  I disagree 100% with you. I love comments like GP. Any new tool should be considered in comparison to the other tools one might use for the same job. Is Grafana "barely related even tangentially"? No it is quite related. Have the creators of Cyclotron considered how it compares to existing tools? Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it.
  - arxpoetica 10y ago
    Yes.
  - ascendantlogic 10y ago
    Exactly. I need to understand what value this particular software brings to the table compared to the "competition" before I will invest any serious time into looking at it.
  - kordless 10y ago
    > Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it. No software developer is obligated to do anything for any of us. It's on US to figure things out and share them as we see fit. Nobody cares if you are willing to invest serious time looking into it or not. Asking a leading question and linking to something most of us have already seen is pointless. Defending it when a good argument was presented is also pointless. I hazard these discourses are linked to age.
    - Bjartr 10y ago
      Stop presuming that just because you're familiar with something that it's no longer worth bringing up. I've never used any of these tools and value the discussions about them that questions like the thread starter's allow. Further, there are always new people looking to learn and grow. They shouldn't be looked down upon simply because others got there first. What makes you think the question was a leading question rather than a genuine one? There isn't enough there to definitively determine the intent in any case, so it's up to whoever responds to decide which way of reading the question they will respond to, and that's an opportunity for the larger software community and for the developers of the projects in question to nurture thier communities. Just because it doesn't have value to you doesn't mean it doesn't have value to others.
- MichaelApproved 10y ago
  Consider that a comment like OP's starts a conversation about this product and also shares a similar product with the community for more exposure. Sometimes, the creator of the product will even step in to expand on the topic. It's not the most articulate way of starting the conversation but it is effective.
- pryelluw 10y ago
  The poster above made a great question to the community. There is an amazing amount of value from the feedback that experienced users provide. Ive gotten a lot of value from people who post similar questions because others go out of their way to help. Ive discovered many a great software like this. The comment gives the OP the chance to compare pros and cons from a technical point of view. Its not a personal attack, but an invitation to discuss a software in technical terms.
- igotoo 10y ago
  Well, I for one I'm with weego. The way I read it anyway, he's not against "How it compares" posts, he's against "How does it compare?" ones. Quite frankly, if you want to know it takes five minutes to head over to the respective docs and get a rough idea, as I just did. If you're super-motivated you can even then share your conclusions and tell us "How does it compare: like this, this, and that" (which I won't). But just shooting a question away like that is not helpful and comes across as lazy.
  - Bjartr 10y ago
    What about how if someone has read the docs and could answer the question would become motivated to write up what they think because they see someone is interested in knowing? Losing that opportunity for sharing knowledge is, in my mind, worse than having the question not appear at all. And lazy? Since when is asking questions is lazy? People are reading a lot of intent from what was a very plain and straightforward question. What I think would be valuable would be if someone shared why the mere presence of such questions is somehow detrimental to the point that they can't simply be ignored, which I don't think has yet been explained.
- ckastner 10y ago
  > If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that research is interesting enough YOU post it Would you read a scientific paper on well-established topic X if it omitted a comparison to related work? X, here, being dashboards.
- Bjartr 10y ago
  I find GP's kind of post and the discussions that often follow to be some of the best on HN, IMO. To me, it's the spirit of your post that drives many away from software development. This holier-than-thou attitude of how dare someone ask a reasonable question of people who might be able to easily answer, or direct to an answer. Someone asking a question like this isn't saying, "Hey, next person that comes by, do some research for me" it's saying "Would someone that has already done this research mind sharing their findings?" Progress in knowledge base communities is driven primarily by building on existing knowledge. The more readily knowledge is shared, the faster progress will be. So having a culture where anyone seeking answers must redo the groundwork that has already been done by others in order to "earn" the answer is an impediment to progress within that community.
- SEJeff 10y ago
  Well Grafana being pretty much the dominant dashboard tool for most users seems to make it the thing to compare against. I disagree with your thought as well. If I was to make a competitor to say Linux, it is up to me to tell people why it is better. Seems entirely reasonable to ask for seeing as how Grafana has support for an unbelievable amount of things and is quite battle tested for real ops and dev teams.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  IMO this is totally backwards. A new product should justify why it's preferable to what's out there. Don't waste potential users' time making them research when you could just lay it out for them.
joneholland 10y ago
Most teams at Expedia use Grafana now. Cyclotron was built back before Grafana existed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
coredog64 10y ago
I like Grafana. I use Grafana. I've got Grafana open in another tab right now. For all that, Grafana ain't all that and a bag of chips. Grafana is very hard to extend with new visualizations. It uses "flot", a JavaScript library that hasn't seen a commit in Github in 2 and a half years. The documentation is poor. There is definitely a need for dashboard software that allows for more complex custom visualizations -- I'll be looking closely at this.
- mattttt 10y ago
  The latest versions of Grafana now have a pretty extensible plugin architecture, and the types of panels have been growing by the community at Grafana.net. We're even seeing some new contributions that use D3 instead of Flot, which is super exciting to me. Full disclosure, I work for Grafana, but seemed relevant to mention.
- ergo14 10y ago
  Have you tried appenlight charting?
- doublerebel 10y ago
  I worked with Chart.js contributors to add real-time graphs, to use them as a replacement for Flot in Godot2-dash/Riemann-dash. Here's examples of the final result [0], it's better than I could have hoped for. [0]: http://playground.abysscorp.org/chartjs/livecharts/ http://playground.abysscorp.org/chartjs/livecharts/
- macandcheese 10y ago
  I haven't run across a worse-documented or harder to wrangle JS charting library than Flot, ha...
cheapsteak 10y ago
From a superficial perspective, Grafana is > Go 33.9% TypeScript 26.4% HTML 15.0% JavaScript 14.2% CSS 8.5% Shell 1.6% Other 0.4% Cyclotron is > CoffeeScript 45.1% JavaScript 30.5% HTML 15.4% CSS 8.9% Nginx 0.1% Both are using Angular 1, installed via bower ([Grafana is on 1.5.8](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/bower.json https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/bower.json), [Cyclotron is on 1.4.9](https://github.com/ExpediaInceCommercePlatform/cyclotron/blob/master/cyclotron-site/bower.json) https://github.com/ExpediaInceCommercePlatform/cyclotron/blo...)
baumandm 10y ago
Hi, Cyclotron developer here. I think it's fair to say Cyclotron is a bit more open-ended in terms of what you can build, whereas Grafana dashboards are a bit more structured and tend to look more similar. While Cyclotron provides common widgets and dashboard functionality, it also makes it easy to add custom HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. This broadens the potential use cases quite a bit. The downside of being more open-ended is that it doesn't provide the same level of rich interactivity out of the box, which Grafana does. Additionally, when Cyclotron started, it supported pulling data from a handful of different data sources, whereas Grafana was focused on Graphite. Grafana has definitely come a long way in the last year in this regard though.

I really like grafana

weego 10y ago

Can I just take a moment, and I apologise up front for singling you out for this one, to say how much I hate comments like this, even more that they get upvoted. There's always some arbitrary software mentioned that is often barely related even tangentially and expect someone else to reply with the info. If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that research is interesting enough YOU post it. Don't expect other people to do it for you, or worse, make it so that the creator of something that might not even be the one linking it feels like they have to justify why they open sourced something.

joneholland 10y ago
I don't think this is fair criticism. Grafana is an exact competitor to this, and as the market leader, it's only natural to be the benchmark.
ausjke 10y ago
no I like these short posts too, even though with more info it will be more helpful. Providing related links is still useful, it took me less than one minute to check out quickly. Thanks.
- hacktothefuture 10y ago
  I agree with you! This is how I found VueJS when someone made a similar, tangentially related post which was essentially, "Yea but I like VueJS much better for reason x". It exposed me to something I didn't know about.
dsjoerg 10y ago
I disagree 100% with you. I love comments like GP. Any new tool should be considered in comparison to the other tools one might use for the same job. Is Grafana "barely related even tangentially"? No it is quite related. Have the creators of Cyclotron considered how it compares to existing tools? Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it.
- arxpoetica 10y ago
  Yes.
- ascendantlogic 10y ago
  Exactly. I need to understand what value this particular software brings to the table compared to the "competition" before I will invest any serious time into looking at it.
- kordless 10y ago
  > Probably, and they should come forward and be open about it. No software developer is obligated to do anything for any of us. It's on US to figure things out and share them as we see fit. Nobody cares if you are willing to invest serious time looking into it or not. Asking a leading question and linking to something most of us have already seen is pointless. Defending it when a good argument was presented is also pointless. I hazard these discourses are linked to age.
  - Bjartr 10y ago
    Stop presuming that just because you're familiar with something that it's no longer worth bringing up. I've never used any of these tools and value the discussions about them that questions like the thread starter's allow. Further, there are always new people looking to learn and grow. They shouldn't be looked down upon simply because others got there first. What makes you think the question was a leading question rather than a genuine one? There isn't enough there to definitively determine the intent in any case, so it's up to whoever responds to decide which way of reading the question they will respond to, and that's an opportunity for the larger software community and for the developers of the projects in question to nurture thier communities. Just because it doesn't have value to you doesn't mean it doesn't have value to others.
MichaelApproved 10y ago
Consider that a comment like OP's starts a conversation about this product and also shares a similar product with the community for more exposure. Sometimes, the creator of the product will even step in to expand on the topic. It's not the most articulate way of starting the conversation but it is effective.
pryelluw 10y ago
The poster above made a great question to the community. There is an amazing amount of value from the feedback that experienced users provide. Ive gotten a lot of value from people who post similar questions because others go out of their way to help. Ive discovered many a great software like this. The comment gives the OP the chance to compare pros and cons from a technical point of view. Its not a personal attack, but an invitation to discuss a software in technical terms.
igotoo 10y ago
Well, I for one I'm with weego. The way I read it anyway, he's not against "How it compares" posts, he's against "How does it compare?" ones. Quite frankly, if you want to know it takes five minutes to head over to the respective docs and get a rough idea, as I just did. If you're super-motivated you can even then share your conclusions and tell us "How does it compare: like this, this, and that" (which I won't). But just shooting a question away like that is not helpful and comes across as lazy.
- Bjartr 10y ago
  What about how if someone has read the docs and could answer the question would become motivated to write up what they think because they see someone is interested in knowing? Losing that opportunity for sharing knowledge is, in my mind, worse than having the question not appear at all. And lazy? Since when is asking questions is lazy? People are reading a lot of intent from what was a very plain and straightforward question. What I think would be valuable would be if someone shared why the mere presence of such questions is somehow detrimental to the point that they can't simply be ignored, which I don't think has yet been explained.
ckastner 10y ago
> If you want to know how it differs, YOU look it up and if the outcome of that research is interesting enough YOU post it Would you read a scientific paper on well-established topic X if it omitted a comparison to related work? X, here, being dashboards.
Bjartr 10y ago
I find GP's kind of post and the discussions that often follow to be some of the best on HN, IMO. To me, it's the spirit of your post that drives many away from software development. This holier-than-thou attitude of how dare someone ask a reasonable question of people who might be able to easily answer, or direct to an answer. Someone asking a question like this isn't saying, "Hey, next person that comes by, do some research for me" it's saying "Would someone that has already done this research mind sharing their findings?" Progress in knowledge base communities is driven primarily by building on existing knowledge. The more readily knowledge is shared, the faster progress will be. So having a culture where anyone seeking answers must redo the groundwork that has already been done by others in order to "earn" the answer is an impediment to progress within that community.
SEJeff 10y ago
Well Grafana being pretty much the dominant dashboard tool for most users seems to make it the thing to compare against. I disagree with your thought as well. If I was to make a competitor to say Linux, it is up to me to tell people why it is better. Seems entirely reasonable to ask for seeing as how Grafana has support for an unbelievable amount of things and is quite battle tested for real ops and dev teams.
nerdponx 10y ago
IMO this is totally backwards. A new product should justify why it's preferable to what's out there. Don't waste potential users' time making them research when you could just lay it out for them.

joneholland 10y ago

Most teams at Expedia use Grafana now. Cyclotron was built back before Grafana existed. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

coredog64 10y ago

I like Grafana. I use Grafana. I've got Grafana open in another tab right now. For all that, Grafana ain't all that and a bag of chips. Grafana is very hard to extend with new visualizations. It uses "flot", a JavaScript library that hasn't seen a commit in Github in 2 and a half years. The documentation is poor. There is definitely a need for dashboard software that allows for more complex custom visualizations -- I'll be looking closely at this.

mattttt 10y ago
The latest versions of Grafana now have a pretty extensible plugin architecture, and the types of panels have been growing by the community at Grafana.net. We're even seeing some new contributions that use D3 instead of Flot, which is super exciting to me. Full disclosure, I work for Grafana, but seemed relevant to mention.
ergo14 10y ago
Have you tried appenlight charting?
doublerebel 10y ago
I worked with Chart.js contributors to add real-time graphs, to use them as a replacement for Flot in Godot2-dash/Riemann-dash. Here's examples of the final result [0], it's better than I could have hoped for. [0]: http://playground.abysscorp.org/chartjs/livecharts/ http://playground.abysscorp.org/chartjs/livecharts/
macandcheese 10y ago
I haven't run across a worse-documented or harder to wrangle JS charting library than Flot, ha...

cheapsteak 10y ago

From a superficial perspective, Grafana is > Go 33.9% TypeScript 26.4% HTML 15.0% JavaScript 14.2% CSS 8.5% Shell 1.6% Other 0.4% Cyclotron is > CoffeeScript 45.1% JavaScript 30.5% HTML 15.4% CSS 8.9% Nginx 0.1% Both are using Angular 1, installed via bower ([Grafana is on 1.5.8](https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/bower.json https://github.com/grafana/grafana/blob/master/bower.json), [Cyclotron is on 1.4.9](https://github.com/ExpediaInceCommercePlatform/cyclotron/blob/master/cyclotron-site/bower.json) https://github.com/ExpediaInceCommercePlatform/cyclotron/blo...)

baumandm 10y ago

Hi, Cyclotron developer here. I think it's fair to say Cyclotron is a bit more open-ended in terms of what you can build, whereas Grafana dashboards are a bit more structured and tend to look more similar. While Cyclotron provides common widgets and dashboard functionality, it also makes it easy to add custom HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. This broadens the potential use cases quite a bit. The downside of being more open-ended is that it doesn't provide the same level of rich interactivity out of the box, which Grafana does. Additionally, when Cyclotron started, it supported pulling data from a handful of different data sources, whereas Grafana was focused on Graphite. Grafana has definitely come a long way in the last year in this regard though.