The new widget framework introduced in Version 7.0 is a great improvement for displaying metric data in a more flexible way. But, the one limitation is that in order to display multiple metrics all pertaining to a specific entity is still a bit unintuitive. One easy use case to understand this would be network switch interfaces. I can build a dashboard in version 7.0 with a hostnavigator that allows me to select a switch device that populates 2 honeycomb widgets. One honeycomb shows the ingest packet rate of each port per honeycomb cell and the other honeycomb widget shows discards of each port. I can then click a cell from each honeycomb to dynamically change the view of a pie chart that shows the proportion of ingest packets a discards. This is great, but still somewhat difficult to navigate. The reason is that broadcasting is restricted to itemids only. If each of the switch metrics were tagged with something like "interface: eth1/1" this could be used to broadcast to other widgets. Then, the dashboard flow could be:

1. Select switch device from hostnavigator
2. Select a switch port from an itemnavigator (instead of displaying individual items it displays information based on the unique tag:values instead)
3. Upon selection from the itemnavigator it broadcasts the tag:value selection to the pie chart which is pre-built to display a pie of discards and ingest packets based on item patterns or item tag filters

This is a simple example, but the selection and broadcasting of tag:value would create a significantly more intuitive navigation experience because, for this example, each interface has about 6 metrics: 

ingest bitrate

ingest packet rate

output bitrate

output packet rate

input errors

output discards

In the current implementation I would have to make 6 clicks to show all 6 metrics on the vector graphs. This will be a bit cumbersome. But if they all have a tag:value of "interface: ethX/X" we can broadcast that information to listening widgets (they would have to be able to listen to tag:values).

I realize a simple graph prototype could solve for this, but I believe that visualization type have less support from Zabbix these days and the UI is shifting to more vector graphics. And the display of it.

I think the best way to present my example above is:

1. Select a switch device from a hostnavigator that updates an item tag navigator
2. From the item tag navigator I can choose "eth1/1" or "eth1/2" for example.
3. The selection from the item tag navigator broadcasts to a data table that shows 6 columns: one for each of the 6 metrics above
4. The selection from the item tag navigator also updates a pie chart that shows the the proportions of ingest packets to discards
5. The selection from the item tag navigator also updates 2 single item widgets configured to show the percentage of output discards and input errors based on the time selector choice.

Apologies for the long description, but I hope this makes sense. Please let me know if I can clarify anything further and hopefully this gets additional upvotes as I believe this change request will become very important.