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• http://gear.dyndns.org/~paulgear/patches/observium-port-disable.patch
  This adds the concept of disabled ports as well as ignored.  Disabling disables polling, ignoring disables notifications.  I plan to use this on all my edge switches which connect end-user devices which are often turned off overnight or rebooted during the day.  I still want to collect data when they up, but i don't care if they're down.
  
• http://gear.dyndns.org/~paulgear/patches/observium-port-outofsync.patch
  This one changes the outofsync status (red colour) to check both the ignore and disabled flags on a port, instead of just the ignored status.  Apply after observium-port-disable.patch.

There are a couple of things that my patches don't handle:

• Update of the database schema: i couldn't work out how to trigger this except by changing the static config file that said not to touch anything below the comment line.
• Distinguishing between administratively down (/ports/admindown/) which is called "disabled" in the ports menu, and disabled from my patches' perspective, which means to disable polling.

Any feedback appreciated.

• The port summary calls ports administratively down "shutdown" - perhaps the ports menu should use this terminology as well, and we could add an extra menu item for "disabled".
• It would be great if there was a way to set a device type (e.g. "edge switch", or "access layer switch" if you want to be all Ciscoey about it) which would set this flag on all ports by default.
• What would be really nifty is if we could determine which ports to ignore automatically by using the presence or absence of an LLDP neighbour on the port.