I am trying to set an alarm where if I don’t hear from a IOT thing within a certain time I want the alarm set. I have a query that works at AWS Timestream but I can’t get the query result in the right format. I get a super cryptic error message:
“Error
Failed to evaluate queries and expressions” failed to execute conditions: input data must be a wide series but got type not (input refid)"
What is a “wide series”? How do I make sense of this error message?
I did some research…
There are two kinds of series: “long” (and narrow) and “wide” (and short).
The name refers to the shape of the table that holds the time-series data.
If all of the sample data has it’s own column then it’s called “wide”. The header tells you what the data is.
If there is only one column for the sample data and an extra column that tells you what data it is than that is called “long”.
Grafana alert queries expect the data to be “wide”, not “long”.
Since I stumbled also on this OLD topic I just wanted to log my solution here for the record. My data source is Influx, don’t know what the original’s source is though.
Main issue is: _value must be an INT, not STRING
=> So to solve I mapped the result I was looking for (duration) to _value
(I think if your datasource would be SQL you can use ::decimal to convert)
Take a look to the difference in the 2 screenshots one without map() and the other having duration mapped to _value.
If I use it like this in Grafana alerts then I perform a Reduce + Threshold and it should show series with the results.
Hope this helps anyone who stumbles upon this! 
