It’s whatever floats your boat. In may particular case I used HundredGraphs already which was OK but didn’t give me the granularity that Garfana does, or if it did, it wasn’t as blatantly obvious to me as it is with Grafana and also had a cost associated it which Grafana doesn’t.
You don’t necessarily need to be a linux administrator to do what I’m doing, you just need to be familiar with the platform you are working in, and in my case it’s QNAP for this instance. After folks in this forum pointed me in the direction of the platforms they were using (Docker, influxDB, Grafana), I literally had it up and running in about 30 minutes, maybe an hour if you take observation time distortion variances into account.
As far as loosing data goes, in my case, data is stored on the RAID5 QNAP NAS that hosts my Sonos multi-media already, so firing up influxDB and Grafana was a shoe in and also has daily snapshots for backup if something implodes.
For the user who just wants something to do graphing, has a simple fast setup and is willing to pay a fee after a certain threshold has been exceeded, indeed, HundredGraphs is the way to go and should work well for them.
As I said, it is a question of things you like to play with.
Or pay for
BTW, what granularity HG doesn’t provide?
I suppose I could re-install the plugin but I honestly don’t have the time right now - if I remember right and this helps, (lets remember my statement of ’it not being blatantly obvious’):
Technical granularity: One thing I remember is that In HundredGraphs you select the sensor and value you want to graph (Super simple which is good). But I couldn’t find a way to perform math on those values and graph the mathematical results. Perhaps there is a way to do this, but see above disclaimer.
Data set granularity: This answer probably isn’t fair because it isn’t apples to apples (pay vs free), but in HundredGraphs I’m limited to the amount of data I can send over a period of time (Free forever plan) for a more granular plot before having to pay increasing fees. I realize this is your business model and is perfectly fine. But what I am currently using affords me the granularity for unlimited nodes (I have more than 1) and data set granularity (time based plots) I want without having to pay for it since I’m more of an enthusiast vs a revenue generating business. eg:
From one node reporting on a fraction of what I am doing today I received this error in HundredGraphs.
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You current plan:
Free Forever
Error: ““Frequent” plan required for 180.00sec update”
Details: “Frequent” plan required. The Free Forever Plan supports 2 months of raw data retention and data push every 10 mins with 1 node reporting. Would you like to increase the frequency of updates to each 60 sec? Try Frequent plan. Or maybe you need more nodes reporting? Check out our plans
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