Feature request: better support for rates

[cdanis]

At Wikimedia Foundation we make extensive use of Turnilo for data visualization (thanks!).

One of the datasets I use most in my day-to-day work is our 'netflow' data: statistics about the network traffic our routers handle.

It's natural to think of this data in terms of gigabits/second of bandwidth, or packets/second transmitted and received. However, the y-scales on turnilo's line chart are always relative to whatever temporal granularity I've selected in the time split. I don't want to have to think about bytes/5minutes or packets/hour, I want to think about gigabits/second and packets/second.

If there was some way to indicate that a given measure -- or all measures in a given cube -- are best represented as rates over time, with that unit independent of the split-by-time granularity, that'd be really nice.

[adrianmroz]

I’m away from my computer, but you should look at this: #459. It’s not documented, because we have mixed feelings about it.

Give us some feedback and we could cook some story for nice ui for this feature.

[fstolba]

Not OP but I can confirm we've been using $MillisecondsInInterval and found it working well for this exact use case (Netflow analysis).

[adrianmroz]

I imagine this as another action on measure (any measure? or maybe some marker in config? but what about introspection ... ) on left panel. There you select "Rate" and series adds to top bar and popup opens where you can select "rate base". So for example "Click per second" or "Click per minute". Under the hood turnilo would divide measure value by $MillisecondsInInterval times rate (1000 for seconds, 60000 for minutes etc.).

[paravoid]

We're trying:

measures:
 - name: bps
   title: bps
   formula: $main.sum($bytes)*8 / ($MillisecondsInInterval / 1000)
 - name: pps
   title: pps
   formula: $main.sum($packets) / ($MillisecondsInInterval / 1000)

…and it seems to work so far & is a great time saver :)