Question

I would like to ensure that when looking at my web-server response time graphs I can see a good level of detail from 0-5k on the scale of my graph. However occasionally there are metrics above the 5k (File downloads) mark which then increase the scale of the graph making it difficult to see what is going on around the regular range of values.

How do I exclude metric values from being plotted that are above 5k? Bearing in mind I do not want metrics themselves to be excluded.

Or perhaps the best thing to do would be to scale down the high points with log, but then I loose the actual scale information, which is quite useful at a glance.

Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

From the Graphite Documentation:

http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/render_api.html#ymax

Default: The highest value of any of the series displayed

Manually sets the upper bound of the graph. Can be passed any integer
or floating point number.

Example:

&yMax=0.2345

Looks like yMax parameter was only a suggestion at one point. Reported to be strictly enforced as of 0.9.5. For more: https://bugs.launchpad.net/graphite/+bug/412663

Also, from: http://graphite.wikidot.com/url-api-reference

yMin and yMax set the minimum and maximum y-values for the generated
image. A good use of these parameters would be min=0&max=100 when the
value you are graphing is a percentage.

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Some other finds. Not sure if they’re entirely relevant; might be helpful.

graphite-graph-dsl: A small DSL to describe graphite graphs
https://github.com/behrendsj/graphite-graph-dsl

• Added ability to define the right y-axis min and max values:
  https://github.com/behrendsj/graphite-graph-dsl/commit/11e146b0b3eb82faa7c1f5db5af324c81db66144

graphene: Graphene is a realtime dashboard & graphing toolkit based on D3 and Backbone.
https://github.com/jondot/graphene

• Define yMax support: https://github.com/jondot/graphene/pull/33