topic Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts! in Dashboarding

Custom charting deprecation and Data Explorer gaps

AntonioSousa — Wed, 31 May 2023 12:18:10 GMT

I started seeing this for the first time today:

I can't believe this for several reasons:

Data explorer is missing a lot of functionality that Custom charts has.
Evolution of Data Explorer has been minimal since introduced
There is no idea when this is going to happen?

There are a lot of RFEs around Data Explorer, and Dynatrace should make sure that Custom Charts are not dropped before Data Explorer is enhanced to support these functionalities. I'll be doing a list of things that don't exist and I believe are critical in Data Explorer, and that exist in Custom Charts.

In the meantime, if someone from Dynatrace could reply to the third point above, I believe we would all appreciate!

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts! - Status changed to: Under review

RomanW — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 12:18:52 GMT

Hi Antonio!

First and foremost, thank you for your feedback!

Our goal with the recent introduction of the Data explorer (by ending its "early adopter" program) was to provide a more powerful query and visualization tool for data in Dynatrace. In the recent months we focused to provide many capabilities that solve long running feature requests for charts on dashboards, which previously translated to "custom charts". For instance, the Data explorer now allows to utilize Metric transformations and Metric expressions directly in queries/charts on dashboards.

It's correct that there are some capabilities that we still have to add to the Data explorer in order to really cover all that custom charts offered so far. One example is the capability to assign specific colors to series in a chart.

On the other hand, Data explorer already offers vastly improved query capabilities, like filtering metrics on dimension, entity tag and property level. We'll soon start to more actively communicate these particular capabilities to also allow our customer to make use of those new capabilities.

Custom charts not going to be removed entirely for the foreseeable future. This should just communicate that all our efforts go into improving the Data explorer to solve requirements around query and visualization power on dashboards.

With that in mind, could you please provide me with a list of aspects that you'd like to see addressed to fulfill your specific use cases?

Thanks,

Roman

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

Julius_Loman — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 15:44:08 GMT

@RomanW Some feedback from me:

looks like the Split By was even removed from Data Explorer if you access it directly in the menu, see how it looks like in 1.220. I hope this is just a bug and gets updated soon.

It works if you access it from the Metrics menu.
The warning sign for old widgets should not be displayed (yet) until the Data Explorer includes all the features. It really causes confusion for customers. No one wants to see warning signs on their dashboards. Please add a transition period (3-6 months) and then start displaying warning signs.
It's a huge effort to migrate widgets from custom chart to Data Explorer. You might consider a migration path (semi-automatic?)
Data explorer does not display correct timestamps for graphs. Please look at ticket 5334 for details.
From the features assigning colours for individual time-series is really a must-have one

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

AntonioSousa — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 16:22:15 GMT

@RomanW

We are preparing the list but what is greatly frustrating is that in the new menu, which has so many useless/repeated items, Dynatrace has managed to take out "Custom charts"!!! You have to go a great length to get back to it! This is definitely not the way to do things!

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

PedroDeodato — Thu, 29 Jul 2021 09:27:05 GMT

These are the list of aspects that should be addressed to fulfill the specific use cases of our clients. These are all real cases of usage of Custom Charts in existing dashboards:

It only allows for color choosing based on a palette
- In most of my dashboards, I use color coding!
- So not being able to choose a specific color for each line also renders most of my tiles useless

Not supporting graph exporting to images, CSV & XLS
Not possible to custom define the axis, with the units/min/max values
Not possible to remove the legend
Losing axis labels on smaller tiles

For the same tile size, Custom Charts shows labels, Data Explorer does not

Not possible to define custom percentiles for certain metrics in the UI, despite the fact that you can “code” it
A CPU chart where the 100% line is in the middle of the graph, and the scale goes up to 200%.
- RFE: https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Dynatrace-product-ideas/limit-Y-axis-on-graph/idi-p/169873

And I must say that I do not think that Data Explorer is bad, I like and use many features of it, in other use cases! I just think that it is still a lot underdeveloped, when compared to basic (and needed) features on custom charts... It should fulfill the most important features provided by Custom Charts!

I could also talk about the major headache that will be switching all the tiles by hand, one by one, on each dashboard, one by one, on each client, one by one... talk about overtime!

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

joshua_dtrace — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 17:27:46 GMT

@Julius_Loman The "Split By" and other features right now are hidden on the "+" icon on the right-side of the metric row on the Data explorer. I believe there are planned improvements to make that callout larger / more intuitive in an upcoming version of Dynatrace.

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

Julius_Loman — Mon, 26 Jul 2021 20:45:32 GMT

@joshua_dtrace thanks! Still, I consider this confusing. This version should have at least some "what's changed" notice when the user first accessed the changed Data Explorer.

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

rastislav_danis — Tue, 27 Jul 2021 06:26:42 GMT

I wonder, how will Sergio recreate this nice graph in Data Explorer (from Why Devs Love Dynatrace tenant):

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

sean_mcconville — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 11:15:08 GMT

Hello,
The value of metrics reported in the data-explorer seems to give a rounded value:

When compared with the same metric shown in a custom chart:

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

sean_mcconville — Wed, 28 Jul 2021 11:27:16 GMT

The chart migration tool does not seem to work when you have a filter selected for a specific device.

I presume this is because the data-explorer filter allows to filter by tag/name/etc.

It seems the migration tool could be improved by migrating current "Custom device tags" to "custom device:name tags" rather than just skipping the tag (or at least could give a warning that migration was not fully successful)

Custom chart:

Data-explorer

Currently this tag gets totally stripped and causes a lot of confusion for users when the data values change. To resolve it must be manually re-added to the data-explorer.

Since it is the same tag it would be nice if the migration tool could handle it.

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

sean_mcconville — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 14:10:04 GMT

It would be nice to see the series stacked consistently.
Sometimes we see them side by side (within the same minute), other times they are stacked.

Ideally it would be best if it was possible to set a custom resolution/rollup for the datapoints

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

larry_roberts — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 20:32:27 GMT

Kinda a big change that we did not see coming. Communication on this type of stuff needs too greatly improve.

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

AntonioSousa — Mon, 02 Aug 2021 22:46:39 GMT

Every time I go to Custom Charts, the following is appearing:

I have given feedback, but for some reason it doesn't care! We shouldn't be annoyed by a message we also know is not true at the moment. I will happily move when the critical existing features in Custom Charts, that have been documented in this thread, are implemented in Data Explorer.

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

hmdai — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 02:57:49 GMT

I have encountered issue when I convert our existing charts from custom chart to Data Explorer. In custom chart we can use multiple tags as filtering options. However, in Data Explorer, only the first tags is taken into consideration and the second one will got mess up if I press "Run Query"

I have raised a ticket to Dynatrace and the support replies that the default behavior is using "or" instead of "and" for filtering criteria. That is the reason why multiple tags cannot be applied. The only way to include multiple tags as filter is using code mode. This seems to be in contrast to easy-to-use direction of Data Explorer.

As mentioned by @PedroDeodato, we cannot customize the coloring of the chart. The default color palette is too purplerish and not looking good under dark background.

Another issue is the tile does not automatically scaled. The following is the comparison, the left hand side chart is created by Data Exploere while the right hand side is created by custom chart. The percentage figure can be displayed normally under 8x8 size. However, if I shrink it to 6x6. The figures from Data Explorer disappears while custom chart is unaffected.

Data Explorer is a great tool for chart creating. However, it is not mature enough to replace the custom charts.

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

larry_roberts — Fri, 06 Aug 2021 19:36:41 GMT

I at last converted every single custom chart on every dashboard to the new Data Explorer. Only had issues with 2 of them that would not convert for some reason, so I just deleted them and created new ones.

That was a bit painful going through each and every one of them to convert in terms of time. Hopefully they come up with a cleaner process in the future if you need to mass update like this.

I will say though, I am very happy to at long last be able to hover the mouse of charts on a dashboard and see metric data without the need to click into the chart! HUGE PLUS!

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

AlanZ — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 13:59:57 GMT

Hi all,

We were looking at how to "convert" all of our dashboards so we do not loose charts in our dashboards. Doing this manually seems to work fine but since we have hundreds of dashboards and potentially thousands of charts to convert, we need an automated way to do this.

@Anonymous: any suggestion ?

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

larry_roberts — Mon, 09 Aug 2021 19:53:19 GMT

I did create an RFE for this very thing the other day. Just an FYI...

https://community.dynatrace.com/t5/Dynatrace-product-ideas/RFE-Add-ability-to-migrate-all-custom-charts-to-the-data/idi-p/170294

I feel your pain 🙂

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

zietho — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 17:46:54 GMT

Dear all,

first off thanks to @AntonioSousa , @larry_roberts , @hmdai , @sean_mcconville , and @AlanZ for providing all the valuable feedback and acknowledging a lot we also receive internally.

And sorry for our late second reply!

Let's me try to answer the two most important questions in the room...

1. What are you going to add before a deprecation?

- configurable whether you want to connect null values aka stepped charts (out with 1.230)

- coloring per metric time series (1.233)

- ability to pick a desired resolution (1.234)

- stacked column charts (1.235 - see later update in thread for screenshots)

- stacked area charts (1.236)

- being able to use absolute values (1.238)

- export per tile to CSV (planned 1.240)

- decimals, absolute values (planned 1.240/1.241)

- configurable units (planned 1.241/1.242)

When I last checked that should cover most if not all of the feedback provided here so far.

I will update this list along the lines.

2. What about the migration?

I for sure acknowledge the need for this. But to be honest, we spent the time until now gathering feedback, and refining the list I provided above + starting to work on the first items. We accepted the related product idea, which means we will provide an improved migration path!

I will come back to you in Q4 and to provide you with details about what such improvements may look like and what we can ship in a reasonable time so that you can make use of it.

Stay tuned and please reach out to me/us should there be more feedback that we need to consider before a deprecation.

regards

Thomas

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts!

AntonioSousa — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 09:54:51 GMT

@zietho

I greatly appreciate all your effort! I'll also be checking if the suggestions we have advanced, are covered, but I believe so!

@PedroDeodatohad already noticed today that you have changed the alert message that comes with the tiles in the dashboards. Much better than the one that was there before 😉

Re: PLEASE, PLEASE, don't take away Custom Charts! - Status changed to: Started

zietho — Thu, 23 Sep 2021 13:58:21 GMT