Let's talk about visualizing proportions in Kibana.
There's a lot of great options available to you at version 8.1.
First up is the waffle visualization.
I love this one because it's a square
and it fits on my square dashboard really well,
using most of the space for the visualization.
It's also really great when I have data like this
that has a low number of values, so I can see how they break down
and I can use it in a very compact form factor to show me many related metrics
to this one overall metric, all on a single view.
It's very easy to see what's going on in each of these metrics from a glance.
This is not a great visualization
if your data has lots of values you're breaking down by
or small numbers that are less than 1%, as there's only 100 squares on the waffle.
So use it wisely.
Next up is the tree map.
And the tree map is really great because it's very flexible.
I can make it into a rectangle. I can make it into a square.
And it will fill almost the entire space with data.
Similar to the waffle, it's great when the a low number of breakdown values
because we're trying to fit the labels inside of the visualization and
at a glance, it's easy to see what's happening here.
As soon as you get a lot, like this one down here,
you might have the mouse over to see exactly what that value is
and it starts to lose its visual effectiveness at a glance.
So use this one if it makes sense for your data too,
similar to the waffle to the left.
Now let's talk about donuts and pies and bars, all at the same time,
because they're all doing very similar things here.
The difference is donuts and pies will bend your data
and make things look a little bit bigger or smaller than it should.
For example, Frank is not that much different than Richard here,
but on the pie chart, at least to me, it looks a little bit bigger
and more pronounced than it is here.
This is because it's exaggerating the data a little bit
to achieve the circular shape.
That being said, a lot of people really do
prefer the round shape and like the look
because it does communicate that it's a proportion to a whole.
So, no bad choices here, but just the tradeoffs that you're making
when you're choosing which visualization you want.
The bar is the most clear in this case,
because it makes it really easy to see exactly what the values are
and you can even put the values directly on it,
just like you can with these two as well.
To make things more interesting
for the next visualizations, we have to add another dimension of data.
So here we are breaking down by host and our four values,
but we're also going to break down by service executable path.
So this is like, what's running on each of these machines?
And this allows us to show off the mosaic visualization.
This is a great new visualization that we have that
lets you see comparison between multidimensional data.
So I'm able to compare each machine to the processes they're running.
And I can go left to right with my eyes and see where the differences are.
So, for example,
these three machines are all running the same process at the top.
That's their number one process each.
But this machine is running a different process.
That might be interesting to me.
The below two visualizations are doing the same thing with the same data,
but there's little tradeoffs here.
This is a really nice visualization, again, because it's circular
and it shows us, you know, that proportion to whole idea,
but we're not able to make those easy visual comparisons between the different
sub slices within each of this – that second dimension.
So it's more of a better way to show kind of that overall feeling,
but it loses some of that comparison you get from the mosaic.
Very similar case for the tree map.
But the tree map at least is able to fit a few more labels in,
so I'm able to see a little bit more than I can on the pie.
But it still is, you know, a little bit
limited in terms of comparing the values that are happening within here.
So of these three with this data, I think I like the mosaic the best,
but it really just depends on your data.
The mosaic won't be great if you have a lot a number of slices
or if the data is dramatically different from segment to segment
and it just kind of looks like a bunch of ugly scarves or something.
So you'll have to try it out on your data to see.
These are some of the options you have available at 8.1.
There's a couple of others I didn't show, but hopefully gives you an idea of
when to use each one and some of the strengths and weaknesses about them.
I look forward to seeing some of the dashboards that you create with them soon.