Visualize visit history over time

[dimo414]

It'd be really nice to show visit statistics for a URL over time, such as a weekly histogram. There's tons of whitespace on the .detail page that'd be a perfect fit for a chart of traffic over time.

If I understand correctly the data that would be needed is already in place since a separate row is added every minute.

[willnorris]

yeah, this is something I've thought about a few times and just hadn't really taken a stab at it.

Some rough notes as I'm thinking about it again:

• drawing something with the Canvas API might be a good option... lots of libraries to help with that, but might not even need a lib, depending on complexity of the graph
• another option would be an SVG image. really simple example at https://github.com/zwelden/svg-bar-graph
• could do things server side in Go... a couple of projects in that space that came up in searches (though both have been archived): https://github.com/vicanso/go-charts, https://github.com/wcharczuk/go-chart
• then there are larger and fancier options like Apache ECharts, which would certainly give lovely visualations, but probably not worth the extra weight and complexity. Probably best to start with something really simple.

And yes, the data is already there with minute precision. We did recently add the http://go/.export-stats endpoint to dump the visit data so it can be imported into another tool to analyze. That's what we've done internally at Tailscale, but I agree that having some visualizations directly in golink itself would be great.

[j-mcfadden]

Do you think creating a handful Prometheus metrics would be a valid way to help visualize data or does that be a bit heavy?