Charting Time-Series Data
The Charts Search page in the Cloudera Manager Admin Console enables you to search for a time series, plot the time-series data, group (facet) the individual time series if your search produced multiple time series, and save the results as a user-defined view.
You use the The tsquery Language to retrieve time-series data from the Cloudera Manager time-series data store.
To create a custom view with time-series charts of your own choosing, follow the procedures in Creating a Custom View.
To access the charts search page, in the Cloudera Manager Admin Console, select
.The following sections have more details on the terminology used, editing time-series plots, and saving and managing chart views:
Terminology
- Entity
- A Cloudera Manager component that has metrics associated with it, such as a service, role, role type, or host.
- Metric
- A property that can be measured to quantify the state of an entity or activity, such as the number of open file descriptors or CPU utilization percentage.
- Time series
- A list of (time, value) pairs that is associated with some (entity, metric) pair. For example, (datanode-1, fd_open), (hostname, cpu_percent). In more complex cases, the time series can represent operations on other time series. For example, (datanode-1 , cpu_user + cpu_system).
- Facet
- A display grouping of the dataset, shown in separate charts. By default, when a query returns multiple time series, they are displayed in individual charts. Facets allow you to display the time series in separate charts, in a single chart, or grouped by various attributes of the set of time series.
Searching for Time-Series Data
You can search for a time series in the Cloudera Manager Admin Console in two ways: by selecting from a list of metrics or by constructing a tsquery statement in the Search text box.
Search Method | Procedure |
---|---|
List of Metrics |
|
tsquery Statement |
|
For example, the query SELECT jvm_heap_used_mb where clusterId = 1 could return a set of charts like the following:

Editing Time-Series Plots
The time-series data retrieved by the tsquery are displayed on different charts. By default, each time series is displayed on its own chart, using a Line style chart, a default size, and a default minimum and maximum for the Y-axis.
To change the chart-type, click one of the possible chart-types on the left: Line, Stack Area, Bar, and Scatter.
Grouping (Faceting) Time Series
Every time series returned by the query has a set of attributes
associated with it. In this case, each time series will have a hostname, role type,
metric, and entity name attribute. The charting function can group (or facet) the time series into different numbers of charts
by considering these attributes. By default, all time series are plotted on their own
chart (with facets set to All Separate) as shown in
Searching for Time-Series Data. If serviceName is selected for the Faceting option for the query, the time series is grouped
on four charts, one chart each for each service name. The charts for service types with
multiple roles will show multiple lines (for example, HBase, HDFS) while services that
have only one role (for example, ZooKeeper) will show just a single line.
Changing 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.
The following chart shows the same query as the previous chart, but
with All Combined selected (which shows all time series
in a single chart) and with the DIMENSION slider used to expand the chart.
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 half 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.
Saving a View
You can save the charts and their configurations (chart-type, dimension, and y-axis minimum and maximum) as a view. To save the plots as a new view, click the Save as View button, enter a view name, and then click Create. The new view will appear on the menu under the top-level Charts Library tab so that you can select it later. See Creating a Custom View for more information.