Plot cum sum metric

[eirc]

Hello,

I recently setup metricbeat to monitor various metrics over various hosts and I find it very tricky to plot metrics that come in a cumulative sum form like network bytes in any of the visualization options.

I can use a derivative or a serial diff aggregation to plot the change of the metric but when these metrics' cum sum resets I get a negative value in the aggregation result. I can avoid plotting the negative value with:

• Setting the axis' min value to 0 on standard visualisations
• Using positive only on TSVB
• Using an if on timelion

but I still get a zero in these cases and combining for example lots of hosts' network traffics in a plot the zero adds a ton of noise to the graph. Is there any other trick to avoid this?

I was thinking maybe I could calculate the rate value in logstash and drop negative values results there. Any pointers on how to do this maybe or any other solution?

[timroes]

You already mentioned pretty much all of the options you are having

You could of course calculate this pre-indexing and using logstash or any other solution.

If you want to stick with the data you are having, and you are just annoyed by the noise of all the 0 values, you could use timelion's if and instead of setting it to 0 setting it to null. That way that point should vanish from the graph altogether.

Cheers,
Tim