Setting default values for creating dashboards

Grafana
1

All;
I am running Grafana 4.6.3 and have Graphite defined as my data source on Ubuntu 16. When I create dashboards, in the section called ‘Display’ there is an option called ‘Null value’ in the subsection ‘Stacking & Null value’. It has a default value of ‘null’, but I would like to set it to the default value of ‘connect’. Does anyone know how I can change the default value?

Unless I set the value to something other than ‘null’ my line graphs do not display. I figured out that I need to do that because most of my data is collected in 5 minute intervals and most of the data points saved in the wsp database files are values. This only happens when I try to display lines and not bars or points. Data that is collected in 1 minute intervals displays line graphs just fine. Strange, but now I know how to get around this.

Any insight at all would be greatly appreciated.
Best Regards;
Frank

2

There is no setting to change the default for Null value. We chose to set the default to null rather connected as having connected as default could be misleading/dangerous in some contexts.

What the connected value means is: if there are gaps in the data then connect the dots anyway.

So your query with 5 minute intervals has gaps between the values (guessing that it has every 5th data point has a value and the other values are null). You can confirm that by looking at the data returned in the Query Inspector. In some cases, this is fine and in other cases it is in indication that something is wrong.

However, in your case I think you can fix your query not to have gaps. What does your retention schema (storage-aggregation.conf) look like?

Another option is to use the graphite summarize function and group by 5m.