Timelion offset: best userfriendly way to work with offset

[asp]

Hi,

I am very interested in using timelion to support our load tests of our application.
Therefore I want to use the offset function of timelion.

Lets say I have the start time of my baseline test at
2017-01-20 10:00:00
The test which I want to compare started at 2017-01-25 14:00:00

There is the user unfriendly way, to calculate the the time difference in seconds e.g. in excel and then put the result in the offset clause in timelion.

Now the question: is there a more userfriendly way?

1. is it possible to let timelion calculate the time between two strings like:
   es(offset=(2017-01-20T10:00:00-2017-01-25T14:00:00))
2. or is there even a way to forward some variables into timelion? So that the start of baseline and comparison test can be entered via gui without changing the query? That would be great.

Thanks,
Andreas

[weltenwort (Felix Stürmer)]

Hi @asp,

unfortunately the offset is restricted to expressions matching the regular expression [-+][0-9]+[mshdwMy] at the moment. Templating and variables in dashboards is not support either, which is a common request. There are several GitHub issues like #4489, that relate to that. Please feel free to open a feature request or add to the existing issues. In the meantime though, since the query is contained in the URL, it would be possible to create a small external website or tool that performs the date math an generate a url for a single timelion sheet from that.