Viewing Charts for Service, Role, or Host Instances
For service or role instances, or for individual hosts, you can see charts of various metrics relevant to the entity you are viewing.
A limited set of charts appear under the Status tab for a service, a role instance, or a host.
There is also a Charts Library tab that appears for each of these entity types, and which displays a much larger set of charts, organized by categories such as process charts, host charts, CPU charts, and so on, depending on the entity (Service, Role, or Host) that you are viewing.
While the actual metrics displayed are different on each of these pages, the basic functionality works in the same way.
Use the following sections for more information on editing charts, adding new charts and using context-sensitive variables:
Status Tab Charts for a Service, Role, or Host
A relatively small set of charts is shown by default on the Status page of a service, role, or host.
You can toggle between a default view and a Custom view for these charts.
The Custom View
The Custom view is displayed by default when you view the Status tab for one of these entities. Initially it shows the same charts as the Default charts view.
In either view, when you move your mouse over a chart, its background turns yellow, indicating that you can act upon it.
- Moving the mouse to a data point on the chart shows the details about that data point in a pop-up tooltip.
- Click on a chart to expand it into a full-page view with a legend for the
individual charted entities as well more fine-grained axes
divisions.
- If there are multiple elements in the chart, you can check/uncheck the legend item to hide or show that element on the chart.
- Click the Close button to return to the regular chart view.
- When the mouse is over a chart, a down-arrow icon appears at the upper right. Click this to display a menu where you can choose to edit the individual chart, or to remove the chart from the Custom view.
- When the mouse is over a chart, a Clone link appears at the bottom right of the chart. Click the Clone link to duplicate the chart, make any modifications you want, and then save back to the same page or to a different page.
Editing a Chart
You can edit a chart from the Custom view and save it back into the same view. You cannot edit charts in the Default View. Editing a chart only affects the copy of the chart in the current view – if you have copied the chart into other views, those charts are not affected by your edits.
To edit a chart:
- Move the cursor over the chart, and click the blue down arrow icon
at the top right.
- Select
Edit. This takes you to the Edit View page for the view you were at, with the chart you selected already displayed. See Modifying Your Chart for information on editing a chart.
- Click Save to save the revised chart back to the original view.
Using Context-Sensitive Variables in Charts
When editing charts from a service, role or host status or charts page, or when adding a chart to a status page, a set of context-sensitive variables will be displayed below the query box on the charts search page. For example, you might see similar variables for the query shown below:
select load_1, load_5, load_15 where entityName=$HOSTID $HOSTID = serv-1.my.company.com $HOSTNAME = serv-1.my.company.com $CLUSTERID = 1
Notice the "$HOSTID" portion of the query string. "$HOSTID" is a variable that will be resolved to a specific value based on the page before the query is actually issued. In this case, "$HOSTID" will become "serv-1.my.company.com".
The chart below shows an example of the output of a similar query.
Context-sensitive variables are useful since they allow portable queries to be written. For example the query above may be on the host status page or any role status page to display the appropriate host's swap rate. Variables cannot be used in queries that are part of global views since those views have no service, role or host context.
Copying and Editing a Chart
Editing a copy of a chart is just like editing a chart in the current view, except that you can save it to another existing chart view, back to the current Custom view, or to a new chart view that you create.
- Move the cursor over the chart and click the Edit a Copy link at the bottom right of the chart. This opens the Chart Search page with the chart you selected already displayed. See Modifying a Chart for details on how you can modify an existing chart.
- Do one of the following:
- Save the chart to an existing
view:
- Click the down-arrow at the right of the Save as View... button to display a list of the existing chart views.
- Select the view to which you want to add the chart.
- Save the chart to a new
view:
- Click the Save as View... button and enter a name for the new chart.
- Your new chart view should appear in the menu under the top-level Charts tab.
- Save the chart to an existing
view:
- Click your browser back button to return to your original chart view.
Adding a New Chart to the Custom View
From the Custom view under the Status tab of a service, host, or role, you can add new charts to the view.
To add a new chart:
- Click the
and select one of the following:
- From Charts Library - displays the charts page.
- Select one or more charts.
- From Charts Search
- displays the Add Chart To
View page, with variables
preset for the specific service, role, or host where you want to add the view.
- Select a metric from the List of Metrics, type a metric name or description into the Basic text field, or type a query into the Advanced field.
- Click Search. The charts that result from your query are displayed, and you can modify their chart type, combine them using facets, change their size and so on.
- From Charts Library - displays the charts page.
- Click Add.

If the query you've chosen has resulted in multiple charts, all the charts are added to the view as a set. Although the individual charts in this set can be copied, you can only edit the set as a whole.
Modifying a Chart
In the Charts Search page, you can change the properties of the chart you are editing — the chart type (style), how (or whether) multiple time series are grouped into charts, and the dimensions and axes ranges of the charts.
The charts page also shows you the tsquery statement that generated the chart, and you can modify that if you want. For details on modifying the query, see Charting Time-Series Data.
Chart Type
Most charts are shown by default as Line charts or Stack Area charts.
- To change the chart type, click one of the possible chart types on the left: Line, Stack Area, and Bar or Scatter.
Facets
A time-series plot for a service, role, or host may actually be a composite of multiple individual time series. Facets let you chose how to group the different time series in a variety of ways, based on the attributes of those time-series. For example, for a host, the Load Average chart shows you the time-series data for average load at one-, five-, and fifteen-minute intervals, by default all on a single chart. Using Facets you can choose to display each time-series as a separate chart. Depending on the query, you can combine or separate time series based on attributes such as service, role type, hostname and so on. Click one of the facets to change the organization of the chart data. The number in parentheses indicates how many charts will be displayed for that facet.
Dimensions and Axes
You can change the size of your charts by moving the DIMENSION slider. It moves in 50-pixel increments. If you have multiple charts, depending on the dimensions you specify and the size of your browser window, your charts may appear in rows of multiple charts.
You can change the Y-axis range using the Y RANGE minimum and maximum fields.
The X-axis is based on clock time, and by default shows the last one hour of data. You can change the time range for your plot using the time range sets shown at the upper right of the window (right below the Time Range Selector) or by expanding or shrinking the Time Range Selector.