Setting the axis

Now that we’ve broken down how data points are graphed horizontally in time, let’s look at how they are graphed vertically on the y axis. I’m sure whole books have been devoted to documenting how the y axis has been used and abused, from using a logarithmic scale instead of linear or vice versa to improper scale to truncation, but space doesn’t permit going into all these issues.

Like any tool, we can abuse the flexibility of Grafana’s y axis display. In this section, we’re going to point out the opportunities for leveraging the y axis display to hopefully clarify or illuminate our data. We’ll be creating a series of panels depicting various weather observations and then concentrating on different ways to adjust the y axis, including scaling, units, and even the use of multiple y axes on a single graph.

Setting axis units

Let’s start by creating a new dashboard panel by clicking the Add | Visualization...