Wandering Thoughts archives

2018-11-30

I've learned that sometimes the right way to show information is a simple one

When I started building some Grafana dashboards, I of course reached for everyone's favorite tool, the graph. And why not? Graphs are informative and beyond that, they're fun. It simply is cool to fiddle around for a bit and have a graph of your server's network bandwidth usage or disk bandwidth right there in front of you, to look at the peaks and valleys, to be able to watch a spike of activity, and so on.

For a while I made pretty much everything a graph; for things like bandwidth, this was obviously a graph of the rate. Then one day I was looking at a graph of filesystem read and write activity on one of our dashboards, with one filesystem bouncing up here and another one bouncing up there over Grafana's default six hour time window, and I found myself wondering which of these filesystems was the most active one over the entire time period. In theory the information was in the graph; in practice, it was inaccessible.

As an experiment, I added a simple bar graph of 'total volume over the time range'. It was a startling revelation. Not only did it answer my question, but suddenly things that had been buried in the graphs jumped out at me. Our web server turned out to use our old FTP area far much more than I would have guessed, for example. The simple bar graph also made it much easier to confirm things that I thought I was seeing in the more complex and detailed graphs. When one filesystem looked like it was surprisingly active in the over-time graph, I could look down to the bar graph and confirm that yes, it was (and also see how much its periodic peaks of activity added up to).

Since that first experience I have become much more appreciative of the power of simple ways to show summary information. Highly detailed graphs have an important place and they're definitely showing us things we didn't know, but simple summaries also reveal things too.

(I'd love the ability to get ad-hoc simple summaries from more complex graphs. I don't need 'average bandwidth over the graph's entire time range' very often, but sometimes I'd rather like to have it rather than having to guess by eyeball. It's sort of a pity that you can't give Grafana graphs alternate visualizations that you can cycle through, or otherwise have two (or more) panels share the same space so you can flip between them. As it stands, we have some giant dashboards.)

SimpleGraphsAdvantage written at 01:15:42; Add Comment


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