Background to this question
Feedback from a user viewing a Kibana dashboard I've developed:
can we set the interval of time-based charts to 1 hour?
An excerpt of my response:
Yes. However, I have deliberately set the "chunk" size—"interval", also known as "bucket size"—of time-based charts in these dashboards to ">=1m". Meaning: let Kibana decide the interval ("auto") based on the time range of the dashboard, but no smaller than 1 minute; that is, no smaller than the interval of the actual data.
So: the interval depends on the time range of the dashboard, down to a minimum interval of 1 minute. For example, if you set the time range of the dashboard to "Last 3 days", you'll get an interval of 60 minutes.
I could fix the interval to a specific duration, such as 1 hour. And I can see that per-hour intervals might be entirely appropriate and desirable for some use cases. However, doing that limits the flexibility of the dashboard for other use cases:
For a long-enough time range, the number of buckets will exceed the maximum number that Kibana will display on a chart, and the chart will display an error message instead of data.
For time ranges less than the interval, the chart will show only a single data point, rather than scaling to a more granular interval. (Which is what happens now if you specify a time range of a minute or less.)
These dashboards are currently deliberately designed to adapt to any time range, with an interval down to the granularity of the underlying data. (In case you're wondering, I haven't seen any documentation indicating it's possible to specify a maximum interval.)
My question/suggestion
I don't want to create duplicate sets of dashboards: one set with ">=1m", another with a fixed interval, such as "1h". This seems to me a reason to introduce a "global interval" on a dashboard, so that users who are interested in a specific interval can set that value (reflected in a URL parameter), and have all time-based charts honor that interval, without needing to create a new set of dashboards with all time-based charts set to that particular fixed interval.
Thoughts, feedback; pushback?