Date and number formatting in views

[apexuser]

I use views for log analytics. My view contains a lot of calculated data, but it is hard to read due to lack of formatting:

It would be nice to have a possibility to format numbers: add rounding to a certain digit and alignment to the right. The same is for dates/timestamps: formatting of dates, displaying only date or only time, etc.

[dennisoelkers]

Thanks for the input, @apexuser! This is definitely on our mind as well. By answering a few questions from the user perspective you would help us tremendously:

• Would you expect it to be configurable for a widget or for the whole view?
• Where would you expect configuring the format options for a given field? By clicking on the field header (e.g. max(dur_sc)) or somewhere else?
• Which configuration options would you expect?

P.S.: Did you know you can rename a trace/metric (e.g. sum(dur_sc)) by clicking on it in the edit mode of the widget?

[apexuser]

Hi @dennisoelkers, I'am using Graylog just recent few days, so I don't have much of experience and don't fully understand what I will need in future. From my point of view now, I would describe formatting as following:

• separate item in one of context menus: "columns formatting" (wherever it is better to put)
• a setup window opens on click on this menu item
• in the setup window: an entry for each column, where I can choose alignment (left/center/right) and number/date/etc format mask. Probably, editing column name here would be also good.

As for renaming trace/metric, I didn't know about that and I have tried it now, but can't find where to edit. I am using Graylog 3.1.

[dennisoelkers]

Thanks for the input! I might come up with some follow-up questions.

Regarding renaming metrics:

Hope this helps!

[apexuser]

Regarding renaming metrics:

Thank you! I tried to click on column headers...

[coffee-squirrel]

We're also interested in this.

Would you expect it to be configurable for a widget or for the whole view?

It'd be a bit more work to set up a view, but I think having the flexibility of configuring per widget might be useful.

Where would you expect configuring the format options for a given field? By clicking on the field header (e.g. max(dur_sc)) or somewhere else?

I think clicking on the metric or field (keeping formatting details close to the exact item) would make the most sense.

Which configuration options would you expect?

• Rounding (decimal places, nearest integer)
• Convert file sizes (e.g. bytes to MB, MB to GB), or at least bytes to X (main use for us: traffic_accounting_size)
• Digit grouping (e.g. 2361419148 becomes 2,361,419,148 or 2.361.419.148)

[bud1979]

Wanted to add to this issue, as I could see this being a global configuration for the visualization side to just convert this on display in a View/Dashboard. If you look at some others out there the raw JSON,as the "bytes"

Where when displayed it puts it in human readable format:

Could there be an option to have this a global config, but then have an option to disable and configure per widget for advanced use cases?

[jrunu]

Dropping in from Support Ticket# 844251.

I have a use case, where statistical operations on sums of traffic, measured in bytes, are run. This is extremly unwiedly and in terms of charting for quick overview comes with an additional cognitive load.

For example, lets assume plotted a line graph over a sum of traffic events by time. My mouse over now reads 80.5B, then this happens:

1. Wait B does not mean Bytes, those are not fractions of bytes (Since B is the unit symbol for Bytes and I'm working with bytes, that's my immediate association)
2. These are Billions, this is still spectacularly off
3. Of course, these are English Billions not German Billions, so 10^9 not 10^12 (Short scale vs. long scale country)
4. 10^9 are three times three groups, so kB, MB, GB
5. I'm looking at like 80.5GB

Similar for the table view, only that I'm busy figuring out the digit count. In terms of how and where I would expect this, I would aggree with @coffee-squirrel comment on place and features.

As an additional side note, expecially when migrating existing "solutions" for doing such tasks this is a hindrance. My users are not nessecarily concerned with the fact, that maintaining this via Graylog is significantly easier for me. What matters to them is that its now more complicated for them to get the information they need.

[atif-hafeez]

Any progress on this? I think formatting options should be displayed for each metric. ie where user is able to rename the metric.

[manico]

Will this ever be implemented? Seems like a very common thing to round numbers.

[silverasu]

We are migrating from graylog 3.0 and this version converted automatically big sum numbers to k and M and G. Would like to see this feature in new versions too :)

[szimmer-dap]

I stumbled upon this issue while searching for a way to round values in dashboard widgets. Is there really no way to do this? Is there any update on this? Seems like a relatively easy thing to implement. When using the averaging metric, data tables become really hard to read without rounding. I mean, just look at the following output:

RAM	CPU usage	real time
857,237,796.5714285	102.296875	18,130.0628052
452,964,352	10.578125	3,202.9748535
1,028,811,434.6666666	45.578125	6,493.1755371
13,953,341,030.4	17,332.015625	14,705.2979736
528,502,784	10.984375	3,406.6982422
4,908,074,325.333333	1,797.53125	12,723.0146484
14,757,280,972.8	10,906.859375	10,471.6052246
460,615,680	12.453125	4,501.7316895
8,424,964,096	256.671875	4,433.9917603
722,814,293.3333334	153.125	18,374.0564651
1,541,982,890.6666667	94.4375	1,619.6959972
509,425,664	16.6875	2,157.6064453
1,529,498,530.909091	498.6875	25,081.7860909
534,872,064	7.828125	31.9356384
3,130,890,240	383.28125	10,056.3068848
475,529,216	23.859375	13,942.5453491
2,984,955,904	3,242.25	20,295.3771973
2,681,042,944	507.203125	13,063.1945801

[Evertvdw]

Trying to piece together my first dashboard today, but quickly stumbling upon this issue. Pretty astounding that this is not possible currently, I'm showing some single numbers on a dashboard which display 15 !!! digits after the decimal.