Hi,
What is the meaning of dotted lines in the visualizations?
What is the meaning of duration in the visualizations?
Hello @Ankita_Pachauri ,
2- The "Duration" refers to the response time of the monitored application, which is the time it takes for the application to respond to a request. Essentially, it is a measure of how quickly your application is processing and responding to requests.
Hello again,
Regarding item 1, which version of Elastic are you using? 8.13? Could you send a screenshot of the entire screen with the settings open?
Here is a discussion, but I don't know if it helps much.
opened 08:22AM - 23 Aug 23 UTC
enhancement
Feature:ElasticCharts
Team:Visualizations
Feature:Lens
impact:medium
# 📖 Description
> Please read the following issue description and solution fo… r context:
>
> - [x] https://github.com/elastic/obs-infraobs-team/issues/1134
When dotted lines show in embedded Lens visualisations, it is not clear to the user why there are there or what they mean. In the Infra UI (e.g. [hosts](https://edge-lite-oblt.kb.us-west2.gcp.elastic-cloud.com/app/metrics/hosts)) we use this on all charts so that when users use a duration which leads to a interval which is shorter than the frequency of data collection - they don't see spikey lines like this:
_Spikey lines_
Instead, we show this:
_Gaps filled_
We use the following lens config to achieve this:
### Why do we use the dotted line?
Without the dotted line, our target user (the SRE) won't be able to see genuine gaps in data (e.g. an outage for an hour). The dotted lines allow them to see when data is being filled in. For example:
_Example gap_
### What's the problem?
The dotted line is not explained in the UI so the user is not able to see why one chart has a dotted line and why another doesn't.
### Our workaround
We are adding a link in a popover pointing towards documentation to explain to the user that:
- They will see a dotted line if they use a duration which is short enough so that we need to fill in the missing values to remove spikes
- They will also see a dotted line when there is a genuine gap in data
_Sample tooltip_
# Solution Proposal
The workaround we are doing relies on the user finding our popover, we can't surface it when dotted lines show (as we don't know when it is happening).
- We want the user to be able to easily see why there is a dotted line when there is one (e.g. maybe when they hover on it or maybe it would be immediately apparent in the chart
- We also don't want to share a generic explanation about the dotted lines as it still won't explain why it makes entire lines dotted at short durations - we want to explain the behaviour in a way which makes sense to the context of how we are using it in our UI (e.g. maybe we add a short explanation and a link to our docs)
> **Note** : Sharing a generic explanation if they want to dig more into how it works is fine but we assume that the user doesn't want to learn about lens - they want the simplest explanation of what the dotted lines means in the context of what they are seeing and **why** they are seeing it (and perhaps they can learn more about the underlying lens functionality in a further link)
2 Likes
Thanks for the response, the version of the stack is 8.13.4 and I can confirm that there is no break in data collection and I can see all the events under discover, do you know any other reason for this dotted line being shown.
