Gauge Widget

The Gauge widget serves as a visual representation of a single numeric value within a defined range.

It is used for providing context, example use cases include:

  • Show errors per day and indicate whether values are approaching critical levels

  • Represent the progress of vulnerability assessment and remediation efforts

  • Monitor system resource utilization, like CPU or memory utilization.

The Gauge widget supports two representations of the current value:

  • Needle representation, which mimics the traditional analog gauges such as speedometers.

  • Filler representation, which provides a dynamic option to fill a segment of the gauge based on the current value.

See in Figure 161, “Gauge Chart” an example of how this widget looks like.

Gauge Chart

Figure 161. Gauge Chart


Input Format

As the Gauge widget is using a numeric scale, it is compatible with queries that output a single numeric field such as sum(), count(), or avg() which produce a single row with a single field (e.g. _sum).

For visualizing text values instead, see Single Value Widget.

For results based on grouping on a single field, the widget also supports data visualization in multiple charts arranged in a grid, allowing them to be easily compared, see Display Small Multiple Charts.

You can customize your widget by changing its default values range and its formatting: see Gauge Widget Properties.

For examples on how to create Gauge widgets, see Creating Gauge Chart Widgets.

Gauge Widget Properties

From the widget menu (see Figure 118, “Widget Menu”) click Widget to set:

  • Title

    The title of the widget as displayed in the dashboard.

  • Description

    The description of the widget. This is free form text supporting markdown syntax. The description appears in the dashboard as a tooltip when hovering over the question mark on top of the widget.

Click Styling to configure the widget's properties (find some Styling panel examples at Creating Gauge Chart Widgets):

  • Layout

    • Type can be:

      • Radial Fill — A radial gauge where the value is indicated by a colored arc.

      • Radial Needle — A radial gauge where the value is indicated by a needle.

    • Padding — Percentage of widget height or width used for padding. Useful when labels will otherwise be clipped.

  • Value

    • Format — The available units that can be used to express values. Valid options are:

      • Raw shows the number without formatting (e.g., 4987)

      • Abbreviated shows the number abbreviated as thousands (K), millions (M), billions (B), or trillions (T).

      • Metric shows the number abbreviated with metric (SI) prefixes.

      • Time converts the value to a time span (years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds...), depending on the input type selected.

    • Input type — Enabled when the Time format is selected, gives the input units available to express values. Valid options are:

      • Milliseconds

      • Seconds

    • Decimal places — Enabled when the Raw or Metric formats are selected, indicates the number of digits past the decimal point. It is possible to do number rounding by providing negative decimal places e.g., a decimal place of -2 would format the number 123 to 100.

    • Suffix allows to provide any symbol or definition useful to describe the resulting value. For example, $ or ms.

  • Range defines the minimum and maximum values of the gauge. Options are:

    • Min value — default is 0

    • Max value — default is 100

    • Show min/max values allows to display these values in the chart.

  • Colors to customize the chart colors.

    • Palette allows to choose a predefined palette of colors (can be diverging colors or monochrome with different nuances) automatically assigned to thresholds.

    • Thresholds allows to configure thresholds for the selected colors, for example light green applied to all values below 50, dark green for all above 100. You can modify the color for any threshold: this will turn the palette to a Custom palette. Multiple thresholds are supported.

  • Labels — A list of labels and associated anchor values. Anchor values describe where on the gauge the label is drawn. For example, an anchor value of 50 on a range from 0 to 100 would draw the label at the midpoint of the gauge.

  • Small multiples

    When toggled, the query result is partitioned using the first grouping field or the specified field in the settings, and a visualization for each subresult is displayed in a grid.

    • Field name — name of the field used to partition the query result.

    • Number of columns — the number of columns in the grid. If the number of visualizations are less than the desired number of columns, the number of visualizations are used instead. If the resulting size of each visualization will be smaller than 150px, the number of columns are also overwritten by the maximum possible.

    • Show borders — allows to show or hide a border around each visualization.

Creating Gauge Chart Widgets

The procedure for creating Gauge widgets is described in the examples that follow.

Display Number of Errors

To show the number of errors in a system, you could count them using the count() function.

  1. From the Search tab, type this query in the Query Editor:

    logscale
    loglevel = /error/i
| count()

  2. Save your widget as explained at Create from a Query

  3. Click the menu icon on top-right of the widget and select Styling, the Styling panel is displayed on the side of the widget:

    Gauge Chart with Properties Panel - Example 1

    Figure 162. Gauge Chart with Properties Panel - Example 1


  4. Set the properties as desired:

    • Layout → choose Radial Needle type in this example

    • Value → choose Raw format

    • Colors → adjust the colors for the thresholds you have defined, thus creating a custom palette.

Display Query Memory

If you use LogScale to monitor your costs in terms of memory consumption, you can display the average memory allocated for your queries activity.

  1. From the Search tab, type this query in the Query Editor:

    logscale
    "direct memory allocated"
| group=query
| avg(bytes)

    This search extracts the events having query as the value found for the group field, and uses the avg() function to calculate the average memory allocation of queries in the system, in bytes.

  2. Save your widget as explained at Create from a Query

  3. Click the menu icon on top-right of the widget and select Styling, the Styling panel is displayed on the side of the widget:

    Gauge Chart with Properties Panel - Example 2

    Figure 163. Gauge Chart with Properties Panel - Example 2


  4. Set the properties as desired:

    • Layout → choose Radial Needle type in this example

    • Value → choose the Abbreviated format to show the values as millions (M)

    • Range → define the min and max values your widget should display

    • Colors → choose a palette among those available

    • Thresholds → set consistent thresholds according to your data: for example, you want values exceeding 20 millions bytes of memory displayed in red.

Display Small Multiple Charts

You can compare results for the different values of a field: for example, how many ERRORS, INFO and WARN values for the field loglevel are returned, and display them next to each other in a grid.

  1. From the Search tab, type this query in the Query Editor:

    logscale
    groupBy(loglevel)

    This search groups values of field loglevel.

  2. Save your widget as explained at Create from a Query

  3. Click the menu icon on top-right of the widget and select Styling, the Styling panel is displayed on the side of the widget:

    Gauge Chart with Properties Panel - Example 3

    Figure 164. Gauge Chart with Properties Panel - Example 3


  4. Set the properties as desired:

    • Layout → choose Radial Fill type in this example

    • Value → choose the Abbreviated format

    • Range → define the min and max values your widget should display

    • Colors → any number should have the same color

    • Small multiples → the grid should display small multiples in 2 columns