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Should I always smooth data using movingAverage?

Asked by François Beausoleil

It's real-life data, thus it's noisy and sometimes hard to read. Should I always smooth it out using a moving average, or would summarize be better in this case? I don't really understand the difference between both anyways. The biggest difference seems to be one is tied to time, while the other one is tied to actual number of points.

When I get a clear answer, I can start expanding http://graphite.readthedocs.org/en/latest/url-api.html

Thanks!
François

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Nicholas Leskiw (nleskiw) said : 		#1

François,

It's really up to you on smoothing the data.
movingAverage keeps the resolution of the graph - if you're collecting data every minute, movingAverage returns data for every minute. Summarize reduces the resolution of the graph. If you're collecting data every minute, but use summarize(metric.name,"15m") the graph only has datapoints every 15 minutes, and the TOTAL (not average) is graphed at each 15 minute interval.

compare the functions with the &rawData=true parameter to explore the difference.

Also, please check my branch called nleskiw-docs. I'm updating url-api.rst and adding docstrings directly to webapp/graphite/render/functions.py. ( I thought of putting them in url-api but was persuaded by the maintainer to make docstrings for each function in the code itself.

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