Interpreting Orion data charts and graphs

This section examines the data displays from various SolarWinds Platform products and discuss what is represented in the data. We look at the data representations used and note what is common between products.

Gauges

One important property of gauge data is that each new data point can be larger or smaller than the previous data point. Gauge data is often shown on a gauge as raw, or unaltered, data. Some people assume that gauge displays are real-time, but SolarWinds Platform gauges are not real-time. They reflect the data from the last polling cycle.

Charts

Charts, such as the Min/Max/Average graphs, are used extensively in several SolarWinds Platform products. These graphs show a large amount of information in a single resource.

This graph shows all the data available since the first of the month up to today. Each bar represents a data interval. The interval used for this graph is one day. The chart shows the bars to indicate the maximum data rate seen during each sample interval. This gives a data range for each interval, which means that each bar represents multiple polled data points.

The ranges in each bar are averaged and shown by the blue line running through them. The average is calculated by averaging all the data points in each sample period.

The trend line is calculated using a method called a least squares fit.

The 95th percentile line indicates the level at which 95% of all data on the chart is at or below.

For more information, see Customizing charts in the SolarWinds Platform Web Console.