Monitoring integrations come with a predefined set of charts and dashboards. Great if you want to get started quickly and don’t really know which metrics you should be monitoring or don’t want to spend time building charts and dashboards from scratch. Now, in addition to these out of the box charts and dashboards you can also craft completely custom charts for monitoring your applications using all available metrics. These charts can be added to dashboards to visualize your infrastructure and application behavior.
Custom charts give you full control over how you want to visualize your data. Some data series are easier to analyze when presented as bar charts, others are better rendered as line charts. You can also customize colors, line styles, stacking, and more. It’s all to make your monitoring easier. You decide which presentation method gives you the most power. Ship metrics to Sematext with input format compatible with Influx and build your own dashboards with any metrics by its name.
Imagine you want to correlate CPU and memory usage. The easiest way to see the correlation is to draw CPU and memory usage on the same chart/ CPU usage is expressed in percentages while memory is measured in bytes. No worries – just configure two Y-axes units and assign CPU usage to one and memory usage to the other Y-axis, as shown in this short video:
Do you want to group data series by hostname and sum them up to get total memory usage in your cluster? Just pick the tag to group by and the aggregation function. Do you want to see memory usage of each host separately? That’s just as easy: pick a grouping tag and no aggregation function (‘all separately’).
Custom charts are a beta feature for now. Over the coming weeks you’ll be able to:
- Perform math operations on your data. For example, you’ll be able to create a data series derived from two or more metrics.
- Use filter variables, so all charts on the dashboard can be controlled interactively with a single click without the need to change each chart configuration separately.
- Use the query editor if you prefer typing over clicking to create your charts.
- Building charts that combine logs counts and metrics on a single chart.
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