How to configure a flexible number of charts in a dashboard?

[usd0872]

I'm looking for a way to have a flexible number of charts in a dashboard.

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How it is now:
- At the top of the dashboard, there is a field to select one server.
- For this server one panel with a single area-chart is produced showing CPU %user %system and %idle.

What I want to change it to:
- Change the field to a text input field, so a pattern for selecting multiple hostnames can be specified.
- For each of the specified servers a separate panel with an area-chart is produced.
I am not looking for split chart (multi-series mode).

Why do I want this?
The idea is to give admins the possibility to come in in the morning, specify the servers they are responsible for and get a chart for each server. They than can simply scroll down in a matter of seconds and visually check for any anomalies.

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I can't find any way to do this 'out of the box', but I think it should somehow be possible by using some javascript code. My vision would be to have the input field, which drives some background search. That background search produces the list of servers to produce charts for, passes that list to the javascript code. The javascript code then produces the whole code for the panel, one panel for each servers it has been passed.
Unfortunately my own javascript skills are close to inexistent.

Does anybody about an existing solution (I didn't find any)? Or would anybody be interested in helping to create such a solution?

[woodcock]

Check out sideview utils:
http://sideviewapps.com/apps/sideview-utils/

This has a multiplexer module that can create panels from a search (as can ITSI, if you'd like to go that route). Perhaps @sideview would care to elaborate.

[DalJeanis]

Sounds fun.

However, the amount of side trips it might take is problematic, and I think you can quickly get an approximation of what you want by doing something more like this -

section 1 - a place to enter the wildcard

section 2 - a place to keep track of where you are in the list, and buttons to move forward and back in the list. When these values are updated, they automatically set 4 to 8 tokens with server names that will be displayed in the section 3 panels.

section 3 - a fixed set of four, six, or eight panels, which hide themselves when their selection doesn't exist. Whenever the section 2 selector is changed, they receive their token instructions on what they should each display. (Or, if there aren't enough server names to go around, the unneeded ones hide themselves.)

This kind of thing you can do without learning much programming at all. Just do it for ONE section 3 panel, then clone that with a different token. Once you get that working, then adding two or four more will be a snap.

[usd0872]

A paging solution. Never thought about that but it sounds like some kind of alternate plan. For your section 1 and 3 I see how that works. For section 2 I'll have to do some digging and thinking how to achieve that.