Aggregate function for state/enum values

[human]

We are using RRDtool also for state/enum values, where we assign each state a number and then use intervals (because of interpolation) to plot them accordingly. This works quite nicely especially when you use color of the background to represent the state and over it other graphs.

The problem we are having is when we want to make graphs for other time spans. Aggregate functions available are not useful for this as they are operating just on their numerical values.

Useful aggregate function in this case would be something like using the state in which the system was the most as an aggregate value for a given time span.

This can also be generalized to numeric values with making a histogram (with some bin width) from values and choosing the value with most counts as an aggregate value. In this way this can be also useful for other types of values.

[oetiker]

to make something like this work 'in general' you would have to come up with generic consolidation functions to use in RRAs as well and maybe even a new DS type otherwhise I would expect all sorts of interesting things to happen as the wider public uses such functionality ... any thoughts on this ?