[Bug]: Replication Factor in Home Tab is confusing and incorrect

[ralphm]

Bug description

The Nodes tab has three horizontal panels in the top row:

• A count of nodes by connection status and of active alerts.
• Hexagon node panel: showing nodes as hexagons with configurable grouping and coloring.
• A panel on the right showing two vertical panels:
  • The number of parent, child, and standalone nodes.
  • The number of nodes with a given Data Replication factor grouped by None, Single, and Multi.

Issues:

1. The hexagon panel allows group grouping and/or coloring by Replication Factor. The counts don’t match up with the counts on the right Data Replication panel:
   
2. It is unclear what "replication factor" means. The intended meaning is that if a node is represented by more than one Agent: one other Agent means "single", and multiple other Agents means "multi". Some people expect "the number of copies" of data instead.
3. The number doesn’t reflect the current state: if a node was previously represented by an Agent, but no longer, it is still counted.
4. The number does not take into account retention time periods. So it may be that one Agent has data for last week, but another just for this week.
5. There is no way for users to correct this information.

Contributing factors:

6. When a new parent is introduced to an existing one, there is no full replication of data in order for both to end up with the same information: only the last 24 hours are synchronized.
7. Even if you use netdatacli remove-stale-node, Cloud continues to show the previous relationship between nodes.
8. Virtual nodes (e.g. SNMP) are considered children. This may be technically correct, but they don’t have their "own node".

Expected behavior

• A useful view on data replication that relays that what extend data has been replicated (and what not).
• The current streaming and replication status.

Steps to reproduce

1. Populate a space with nodes, having child-parent relations or virtual nodes.
2. Change the configuration so that childs (or virtual nodes) have other parents.

Screenshots

No response

Error Logs

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Desktop

Additional context

No response

[papazach]

The number doesn’t reflect the current state: if a node was previously represented by an Agent, but no longer, it is still counted.

Even if you use netdatacli remove-stale-node, Cloud continues to show the previous relationship between nodes.

Expected behavior
The current streaming and replication status.

netdata/aclk-schemas#54