
Today we're making area and relative area graphs available for our dashboards to help you display data in new ways.
If you've visited the "performance graphs" page for your app on AppSignal.com, you have seen the "event graphs". These graphs depict event durations such as Database calls and HTTP requests.

Starting today we're making available the display
key in our dashboard YAML syntax, allowing you to display (custom) metrics as area charts.
Syntax
The display
option accepts three values:
LINE
for line charts. (This is the default value.)AREA
for area charts.AREA_RELATIVE
for relative area charts.
In the dashboard YAML it would look like this:
title: Event details graphs: - title: Received/transmitted LINE display: LINE format: number metrics: - name: event_details_received fields: - COUNTER - name: event_details_emitted fields: - COUNTER - title: Received/transmitted AREA display: AREA format: number metrics: - name: event_details_received fields: - COUNTER - name: event_details_emitted fields: - COUNTER - title: Received/transmitted AREA_RELATIVE display: AREA_RELATIVE format: percent metrics: - name: event_details_received fields: - COUNTER - name: event_details_emitted fields: - COUNTER
This dashboard YAML would generate the following charts for these metrics:

Use cases
The AREA_RELATIVE
is a convenient way to compare values over time against each other. In the three graphs above you can see in the LINE
and AREA
charts that the values of both measurements has increased a lot over time. But it's hard to see how the values compare against each other.
The AREA_RELATIVE
display option converts the values to a percentage and shows that while the value of both measurements has increased, but relative to each other they have stayed the same.

You can now take an existing graph and edit it (by clicking the edit button on the right top of a page with graphs) and change a graph type by changing the display field for that graph in the YAML. You can read more about these graphs and how to use them in custom dashboards on our documentation page.
Let us know how you're using area and relative area charts to display data from your app!
Wondering what you can do next?
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Robert Beekman
As a co-founder, Robert wrote our very first commit. He's also our support role-model and knows all about the tiny details in code. Travels and photographs (at the same time).
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