New expressions from boolean algebra

[Mordecaine]

In the old web interface (monitoring plugin) you were able to set the filter logic with OR and AND. Now there are ANY and ALL.
All my colleges are confused what these kinds of expressions mean.

I think there is a reason (even if it is not clear to me) to change the expressions AND and OR to the ANY and ALL. But is it possible to add the old expressions as well? Maybe in brackets near to the old expressions?

[nilmerg]

any == or
all == and
and == all
or == any

Does any of these expressions match?
Do all of these expressions match?

The new labels were chosen to reflect natural language.

[Mordecaine]

But the most people, who use icinga, are people who work in the IT sector.

I ask my colleagues in the last meeting (30 people all adminstrators or developers) and no one was able to understand the "natural language"

I don't say that you should delete the new "natural language" I only say to complement the Boolean expressions.

[nilmerg]

We'll perform our own poll to come to a solution ;)

[davekempe]

The wording on the filters have always been confusing to me. As a native English speaker, both ANY and OR are confusing. The right thing to do is to simply use more words. You have plenty of space.

Any of the following conditions match:
However, from this list, only include these:

I don't even know if those words match the example given, thats how much it doesn't make sense to me.
I often find myself avoiding that dialogue box, as I can't explain it to my customers. As a result, the Icingaweb filters aren't used very much for my staff and customers.

[nilmerg]

Thanks for your input Dave!

The polls are closed, people have voted, we'll change it. (Not yet sure how, though)

[stevie-sy]

After my vacation came into this request. We very much welcome this change to the requested behaviour, because we had as well some "problems" with this new operators after change to IcingaDB. That is why I would like to add our thoughts here also.

So we are the same opinion like @Mordecaine that most - maybe all - Icinga users are from the IT sector or with IT background.
e.g. no one of our office workers will use Icinga at all. For them it is important that they can do their daily work for our customers, with the systems we provide for that.

Only our colleagues from the security, network, db and server admin are using Icinga, to control if their systems working well. So everybody of these colleagues have experiences with query languages like SQL or scripting/programmling languges like C, C#, Java, Perl, Python, PHP, Bash etc. pp. So the question at this point is why to change to a "natural langauge"? Therefore, one should instead (or in addition) focus on those languages ​​that an IT professional knows. And from this point IT admins know the meaning of OR/AND very good for joining different conditions in SQL queries or if condition.

If these languages ​​were to undergo such a breaking change, it would also take some getting used to. e.g.

• SELECT * FROM a WHERE (a.firstname = 'aaa' ALL a.lastname = 'bbb') ANY (a.firstname = 'xxx' ALL a.lastname = 'yyy')
• if (a.firstname === 'aaa' ALL a.lastname === 'bbb') ANY (a.firstname === 'xxx' ALL a.lastname === 'yyy') { do something }

At the first glace, looking strange/unusual, isn't it?

So we are appreciate the decision to change this and looking forward to the update ;-)

[nilmerg]

It would rather be: SELECT * FROM a WHERE ANY(ALL(a.firstname = 'aaa', a.lastname = 'bbb'), ALL(a.firstname = 'xxx', a.lastname = 'yyy'))
This is, coincidentally, exactly how the UI displays the logical grouping. Which is why the new labels were chosen in the first place.

[idandr]

Well, the one line representation of the filter uses & and |. I am used to interpret and spell this as "and" and "or".
The monitoring module used AND and OR in the filter editor. Both presentations matched.
In contrast, the icingadb-web module uses ALL and ANY in the Adjust Filter modal dialog. It is totally valid, but a different wording to represent the same idea. I would be happy to get rid of this additional mental context switch. ;-)

Maybe one could add the short representation in the Adjust Filter modal dialog dropdown boxes: "ALL (&)", "ANY (|)" and "NONE (!)"
This would bring a visual connection between short and expanded representation.