Design decisions: graph submenu

Earlier this week we released an update to support MongoDB monitoring in Server Density. However, you may have noticed that we actually included the majority of the code for this in an agent update back in March.

We had been testing the MongoDB support since then but decided to delay it for a few weeks whilst we reworked our UI because MongoDB had the more metrics than anything else we monitor. This presented an interesting challenge with how to best display the options in our UI.

As noted before, we don’t provide release dates or estimates for this reason. Although the feature was complete, we were not happy with how it would look within our existing UI.

We played with a couple of options. If we just had a single “MongoDB” tab then there would be 20 charts on a single page. This was a real pain to navigate to find the one we were looking for, plus took some time to fully load. The other option was to split the metrics out into several tabs, but as you can see from the screenshot below, it looked a bit strange to have 5 MongoDB tabs when the other applications had a single tab each.

The solution we picked was to introduce a sub menu. This slides down to reveal the options when you click the main tab for a metric type. It allows us to have a single graph displayed right away, you can quickly see all the available graphs and switch between them just as quickly.

We’re constantly trying new ideas and are going to come back to this sub menu for a future release to see if there’s a way we can improve it further. Although we might not be the first to offer a particular feature, when we do we want to make sure that it works well.