Welcome to Trendlines’s documentation!

Contents:

What is Trendlines?

Trendlines is a tool for passively collecting and displaying time-based or sequential numeric data. Built on Flask, Peewee, and Plotly, it provides a simple interface for adding and viewing your metrics.

It was created for a few reasons:

  1. Graphite, while very awesome and powerful, does not provide a RESTful API for adding and retrieving data. (To my knowledge. Please correct me if I’m wrong). Trendlines aims to provide both the RESTful API and the plaintext protocol.
  2. Graphite also does not allow you to view data using a simple sequential x-axis - it only uses time for the x-axis. Again, Trendlines allows you to use both.
  3. It’s always fun to start new projects.

Trendlines only accepts data that gets sent to it. It does not actively seek out data like many other awesome monitoring programs out there (Zabbix, Nagios, Prometheus, etc.).

What can I use it for?

Anything, really. Well, anything that (a) you can assign a number to and (b) might change over time.

Examples include:

  • Test coverage per project
  • Code quality metrics per commit
  • House temperature
  • Distance driven per trip
  • Distance per fillup (or per charge for the eco-friendly folk)
  • How many times the dog barks
  • How often some clicks the Big Red Button on your webpage

It’s been designed to handle infrequent, variable interval data. Sometimes real-world data just doesn’t appear at nice, regular intervals.

Indices and tables