Handy Tips #14: Gain new insights into your metrics with the Graph widget

Anonymous Anonymous

Zabbix Certified Expert & Trainer

December 2, 2021

Group, aggregate, and visualize your collected metrics with the Graph widget to obtain additional insights. Sometimes simple graphs may not be sufficient – we may need to visualize data trends, display all metrics matching a pattern, or define custom draw styles for specific metrics. The Graph widget allows you to visualize your metrics in an […]

Group, aggregate, and visualize your collected metrics with the Graph widget to obtain additional insights.

Sometimes simple graphs may not be sufficient – we may need to visualize data trends, display all metrics matching a pattern, or define custom draw styles for specific metrics.

The Graph widget allows you to visualize your metrics in an advanced fashion:

Customize your graph draw styles
Select between displaying History or Trend values
Calculate and display aggregated metric values on the fly

Define custom aggregation intervals
Define flexible problem display logic
Visually group metrics by defining item and host data sets

Check out the video to learn how to visualize your metrics by using the Graph widget.

How to visualize data with the Graph widget:

Navigate to Monitoring → Dashboards – All Dashboards
Click Create Dashboard to create a new Dashboard
Left-click on an empty space and select Add Widget
Select Widget type – Graph
Type in the data set host and item patterns
Use wildcard symbol ‘*‘ to match multiple hosts/items
Click Add new data set to add a second data set
Fill in the host pattern and item pattern to match a different set of metrics
For both data sets, select an Aggregation function, Aggregation interval, and Aggregate – Data set
Observe how metrics get aggregated in the graph on the fly

Tips and best practices:

Wildcards can be used in host and item pattern matching
The Overrides section can be used to further customize a particular set of items
Items within a single data set will use the same base color
Up to 50 items may be displayed in the graph