Graphite

How can I zoom in on a graph?

Asked by nodata

I have a graph created from all of the cpu metrics for all cpus. It's very big, and no legend is shown.

I can see a spike on one cpu, and I'd like to zoom in to investigate.

So this is really two questions:
1. How can I zoom in on a graph?
2. How can I view the legend for the spike? (showing the entire legend will mean no space for the graph)

Thanks.

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Jason Dixon
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Best Jason Dixon (jason-dixongroup) said : 		#1

1) There is no "drag-select" method for interactively zooming in on the Graphite Composer. You will need to change the date range using one of the date/range selectors in the toolbar.

2) The Composer window consists of the UI elements and the graph itself, which is actually a server-side rendered png image. You can right-click on this image and load it in a separate tab. From there you can modify the URL directly. To view the legend without "squashing" the graph itself try increasing the height value in the URL. It may also help to append "&hideLegend=false" to the URL while you're doing this so you can see the change in effect.

Bonus answer: If you're looking for spikes, try experimenting with filters, e.g. the mostDeviant() function to find the outliers.

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nodata (ubuntu-nodata) said : 		#2

Thanks for the really fast reply. I'll do what you said, but it would be really cool to have zoom built into the gui. I guess if it's not there it means nobody else needs it. I'll look at using filters. Is there a guide to the graphene gui you can point me to? Lots of things don't seem to be covered: for example I can't find a recursive wildcard, e.g. like ** in rsync. I'd like to do blah\*.\* to cover blah-x.y.z.a.b.c and everything else in that tree. Also deleting a single item from a graph doesn't seem to work (if I delete the content I get a broken image).

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nodata (ubuntu-nodata) said : 		#3

Thanks Jason Dixon, that solved my question.

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Dieter P (dieter-plaetinck) said : 		#4

"I guess if it's not there it means nobody else needs it"

no, many would agree it's a desirable feature.

I'm working on a widget that has client-side interactive features (https://github.com/Dieterbe/timeserieswidget), interactive zooming is not implemented yet, but it should be just a matter of properly hooking in the flot api (flot does support it)