Define measurement units in Grafana

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Oct 10, 2024 by Matthew Hierholzer
Since Round Robin Database (RRD) files are nothing more than so-called time series databases, the graphing system is the duty to interpret the values correctly and, if needed, has to recalculate them.


Table of Contents


In Checkmk, this is done fully automatically, and you see “human-readable values”.

For Grafana, this has to be set in your Dashboard. In this example, we'll look at the settings for the network interfaces.


Getting Started

Background information regarding this subject is available in our Official documentation

Step-by-step guide

  1. Open Grafana, create a dashboard, and add your elements, in this case, it is “Interface 2” of the monitored host “mysite01”

    Screenshot of general settings within Grafana
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  2. On the right side, you have “Standard Options”. Open it and click in the empty field just under “Unit”

    Sceenshot of unit section of Grafana config
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  3. Bandwidth might not appear in this dialogue, so type in bits. Grafana will autocomplete, and you can choose your measurement unit:

    Screenshot of different data rates available
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  4. For Interface Banthwith, you might take “bits/sec(SI) so the graph looks good:

    Screenshot of selected data rate bits per second
    Screenshot of visual graph
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    For comparison, the same metrics in Checkmk

Screenshot of same visual data within Checkmk