UX Survey about the Icinga Web filter editor

Icinga Web
1

Hey everyone,

we’re currently evaluating the user experience of the filter editor in Icinga Web.
Filters can get really quite long and complex sometimes.

We’d love to hear from you:

  • What’s the longest or most complex filter you’ve built so far?
  • How was your experience while building it? Did you have any issues finding the right colums to filter for?

Your insights will help us understand how you work with filters today and where we can improve the editor in the future.

Looking forward to your examples and feedback!

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2

I use it mostly for building teams dashboards.

The experience is quite buggy as I had to wrangle with the editor especially for reordering.
Also Finding the right values for some fields as well as finding the fields isn’t intuitive.
I recommend getting some tech affine users that are Icinga naive and give them some exercises to record the problems for the developers.

/icingaweb2/icingadb/services?service.state.is_problem=y&service.state.state_type=hard&service.notifications_enabled=y&service.state.in_downtime!=y&(hostgroup.name=Monitoring|service.name_ci=Agent%20Health|(service.state.soft_state=3&host.display_name!~SECCON%2A&service.display_name!~ORCVIEW%2A))&sort=service.state.severity
or
/icingaweb2/icingadb/services?service.state.is_problem=y&service.state.state_type=hard&service.state.soft_state!=3&service.notifications_enabled=y&service.state.in_downtime!=y&((servicegroup.name=Entwicklung_Monitoring&servicegroup.name!=Monitoring&hostgroup.name!=Monitoring)|(hostgroup.name=Entwicklung_Monitoring&host.name_ci!=ictexap.example.com&hostgroup.name!=Monitoring))&!(host.name_ci=ictcmsswp22.example.com&servicegroup.name!=Entwicklung_Monitoring)&sort=service.state.severity

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3

Yeah, we are aware of the issues with the wonkiness of the editor - this is part of why we’re touching it again.
If we get to it, we’d send you a message with some more questions, if you’re up for it? :slight_smile:

2 Likes
4

I mainly use filters to create reports with the reporting module. The filters itself are super simple, such as “servicegroup.name=Websites”. Even though I’m only using simple filters, autocompletion would still be nice in the module :slight_smile:

2 Likes
5

Im using them pretty often to create dashboards for clients.
Sometimes, a feature allowing me to compare different colums would be great. Like “Show me everything where host.vars.foo has the same value as host.vars.bar at that host”. Or something like “Show me everything where host.vars.foo is empty”.

6

Hi,

Here are some shortcomings I would like to see addressed for filters:

  • ability to move conditions between levels (when AND’s and OR’s are nested)
  • ability to see both textual and graphical representations, and to edit any of the two
  • ability to preview the result, or a limited part of the result
  • ability to lookup field values for a field (making the difference between values in use and not in use)
  • clarification between a filter on “where the field is defined but the value is empty” and “where the field is not defined”
  • clarification between “in” and “contain” operators
  • ability to use a “matches” operator with grep-like regexps
  • ability to select field names (left side of operator) either by id or by name, and always view both
  • ability to select data list field values (right side of operator) either by key or by label, and always view both
  • ability to save a filter, for reuse by name elsewhere, be it in reports, dashboards, restrictions, etc. (some sort of a macro)

Note that some of these requests could actually be due to misuse on my part, but this would also indicate where to enhance the user interface :wink:

Thank you,
Jean

1 Like