Following up on to my last post about plotting two time-series in one chart, I would like to talk about another related, larger topic; plotting multiple time-series on a single chart using a single search. Take for example the case of measuring and comparing values of a certain metric over multiple time ranges that are not adjacent to each other (as opposed to the last post were both series were adjacent; current hour vs. last hour, today vs. yesterday etc.)

Assume that in this example the metric of interest is average(responseTime) of a particular service that you’re offering. Further, assume that we would like to measure it over the last hour and compare it to the maximum of…

Plotting two time-series in a single chart is a question often asked by many of our customers and Answers users. Admittedly, given the many ways to manipulate data, there are several methods to achieve this [1]. Most of them frequently use two searches – a main search and a subsearch with append – to pull target data over the adjacent timeranges that we’re interested on. Then, the _time field is manipulated to overlay both time graphs. While there is nothing wrong with this method, it is typically more efficient to use a single search instead.

I have created and I am sharing three macros to facilitate this. They paint two time-series graphs by using one search while manipulating the _time…