Calculates the average for a field over a set of events. The result is returned in a field named _avg. You can use this field name to pipe the results to other query functions for further processing, as shown in the example below.

ParameterTypeRequiredDefaultDescription
asstringoptional[a]_avg The optional name of the output field.
field[b]stringrequired  The field from which to extract a number and calculate the average.

[a] Optional parameters use their default value unless explicitly set

[b] The argument name field can be omitted.

Omitted Argument Names

The argument name for field can be omitted; the following forms of this function are equivalent:

logscale
avg("value")

and:

logscale
avg(field="value")

avg() Examples

As an example of how you might use the avg() query function, suppose you have a repository with events that include receiving occasionally small files. Suppose further that you want to determine the average size of files received into the repository. To do this, you might use a query such as this:

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avg(field=cputime)
| format("%,.2f", field=_avg, as=_avg)

The query averages the values of the cputime fields in events. The average of those values is determined using the avg() function. That number is then piped to the format() function, which formats the number to two decimal places, using , as the thousands separtor.

The query would return this result:

275901.03

In the example above, the result is presented using the Single Value widget.