> If you never want your data downsampled, keep data at a single resolution...
Sure, and many people do exactly that. The point is that a new user to graphite is likely to be surprised by this behavior. (I would further bet that a reasonable fraction of statsd+graphite users end up viewing incorrect data without realizing it, especially given the statsd focus on count data, for which the default aggregationMethod setting is exactly the wrong choice.)
(And even awareness of this behavior isn't quite enough, since every user needs to also remember their server's exact storage configuration, lest they inadvertently expand their plot across a retention boundary.)
> How would you expect the presentation layer to present n data points using n pixels?
The same way that most plotting tools do so: by overdrawing. Yes, one ends up with a solid block of pixels if the data are noisy and the plot is small, but that outcome is easily understood and has the easily understood solution of explicitly aggregating appropriately. Graphite instead takes the approach of implicitly aggregating based on how wide the plot is rendered in a given interface. That behavior is, at the very least, surprising.
Sure, and many people do exactly that. The point is that a new user to graphite is likely to be surprised by this behavior. (I would further bet that a reasonable fraction of statsd+graphite users end up viewing incorrect data without realizing it, especially given the statsd focus on count data, for which the default aggregationMethod setting is exactly the wrong choice.)
(And even awareness of this behavior isn't quite enough, since every user needs to also remember their server's exact storage configuration, lest they inadvertently expand their plot across a retention boundary.)
> How would you expect the presentation layer to present n data points using n pixels?
The same way that most plotting tools do so: by overdrawing. Yes, one ends up with a solid block of pixels if the data are noisy and the plot is small, but that outcome is easily understood and has the easily understood solution of explicitly aggregating appropriately. Graphite instead takes the approach of implicitly aggregating based on how wide the plot is rendered in a given interface. That behavior is, at the very least, surprising.