Change interval while viewing a dashboard, without editing?

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?

Hi @GrahamHannington this is an interesting idea, could you also create a github issue and link it here? This way you will get more visibility among Kibana engineers.

Hi @Marta_Bondyra,

Done: "Change interval while viewing a dashboard, without editing?", #106357

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 28 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.