Looking for charting recommendations

[cjin]

I'm looking for recommendations for a charting plug in to use with HS3 and potentially HS4. Searching in the forum, I found many postings on Device History (shill) and Jon00's DB charting program. Anyone has experience with both?

[AllHailJ]

If you want to go further afield you can also look at Gnuplot. I am on linux but there is a windows version. I use it to plot all of my temperature sensors. Here is what a plot looks like



Here is the script that plots the data
[ATTACH]n1442510[/ATTACH]


The data is written to a file every 15 minutes and I use OS features to sort and clean the data on a regular basis.Glad to share all of my scripts if you are interested.

[Michael McSharry]

I used GNUplot in the early versions of mcsMQTT for Linux compatibility and then went to the .NET library which is currently being used. A wrapper is needed that makes available a balance of flexibility and ease of use.

i had a reasonably popular plugin for charting in HS2 (mcsTemperature) that used Chart Director as the graphics engine. It provided line charts and heat maps and a few other special formats.

With HS3/HS4 mcsMQTT I went different direction and provided minimum user configurability but maximum ease of use by just clicking on the the device to produce a chart.

The underlying graphics engine will determine the ease at which a chart can be constructed. While .NET used by Shill and I think an earlier library by Jon00, Chart Director and GNUPlot are all powerful they require much work in setting up a chart to make it look attractive and present data in an easy way to understand.

Grafana is a popular current generation choice for attractive charts, but at this time I am not aware of any plugin wrapper that provides a canned set of chart formats from which a user can select. I can see where a Grafana capability will be provided by mcsMQTT in the future, but it is not there now.

[cjin]

Michael McSharry I actually use mcsMQTT to communicate between HS3 and mcsSprinklers running in standalone mode but didn't notice its charting functionality. I assume if I want to chart a particular HS device, I would need to publish that device in order to chart it in mcsMQTT, is that correct? Is the database size of retained device history proportional to the number of days the history is retained, i.e. if history is retained for a year database size will be 12x that of a month?

[kriz83]

Grafana with influxdb, there is no better alternative IMHO

[Michael McSharry]

I recently added support to directly write from mcsMQTT to InfluxDB and that does not require any MQTT associations. That should be the same for HS device to SQLite, but I would need to look to confirm.

Storage use should be relatively linear over time, but just I have never benchmarked it. SQLite is not designed for huge amounts of data so best to only collect what you really need rather than collecting everything just in case you may want to see it in the future. InfluxDB is more like MySQL or SQLServer in ability to handle large data sets.

There are two SQLite History tables. The device table will be able to handle more than the topic-payload table because of number vs. text storage formats.

[kriz83]

You can set retention policies and aggregation intervals in influxdb.

E.g.
- 1 minute samples for 2 weeks
- daily average for a year
- ...

[Michael McSharry]

It is easy to specify the policy for each data write to InfluxDB. It is not clear to me if queries had to be run to action the retention policy in InfluxDB so that the subsampling is done to compress the database at the interval specified by the policy. kriz83, is this automatic once a policy has been defined or does it require some type of periodic user query?

[dmiller]

Device History is probably the most useful plugin I use. The basic charting is adequate for my use. But it writes to a SQLite file, so any other app that can read that file type can make use of the data.

[kriz83]

It is easy to specify the policy for each data write to InfluxDB. It is not clear to me if queries had to be run to action the retention policy in InfluxDB so that the subsampling is done to compress the database at the interval specified by the policy. kriz83, is this automatic once a policy has been defined or does it require some type of periodic user query?

It's automatic, if you creates the retention policies and aggregation query

[cjin]

Michael McSharry Michael, I found the threat about writing HS data direct to influxDB through mcsMQTT in HS4. Latest version mcsMQTT in HS3 updater is still 5.9.3.2. Do you plan to add that feature in HS3 PI as well?

[Michael McSharry]

It is already in HS3 plugin. The links to both HS3 and HS4 plugins is in the thread about writing directly to InfluxDB. Now at 5.11.12.2 for both.

[cjin]

Latest version available in HS3 updater is 5.9.3.2. How do I update to the later version?

[Michael McSharry]

Look at the thread titled something like direct storage of HS device to InfluxDB in the mcsMQTT forum. At the bottom of the first post are instructions for both HS3 and HS4.