If you went away to read about system load, several minutes should have passed. Now is a good time to look at another feature in Zabbix—Graphs. Graphs are freely available for any monitored numeric item, without any additional configuration.
You should still be on the Latest data screen with the CPU Load item visible, so click on the link named Graph. You'll get something like this:
While you will probably get less data, unless reading about system load took you more than an hour, your screen should look very similar overall. Let's explore some basic graph controls.
When you click on the filter, it will flap open and show you a more advanced version, where you will be able to make more fine-grained selections in your time-frame:
In previous versions, Zabbix relied on a time bar that was not always easy to use. Now, in Zabbix 4, it has received a mayor overhaul and, as you can see, it's much, much more user-friendly.
Let's say we have only 15 minutes of data. We could click on the last 15 minutes selection, as in the preceding screenshot, and the graph would show us the last 15 minutes of data. We can now do this from 5 minutes up to the last 2 years. With the zoom out buttons < >, we are able to move back and forward in jumps based on the time-frame we have selected. For example, if we had selected the last 5 minutes, then we would be able to jump back and forward in jumps of 5 minutes.
If we are not happy with the predefined set of time-frames that Zabbix SIA has put in the menu, then it is possible to select our own time-frame. Imagine you would like to investigate a time slot of 2 minutes at a specific point in time. This can be done by selecting the exact start date and end time from the box on the left-hand side of the filter and pressing the Apply button. This is a huge improvement on the previous versions!
Clicking and dragging over the graph area will zoom in on the selected period once the mouse button is released. This is handy for a quick drill-down to a problematic or interesting period:
The yellow area denotes the time period we selected by clicking, holding down the mouse button, and dragging over the graph area. When we release the mouse button, the graph is zoomed to the selected period.
Another nice feature is that, if we like to see the raw values instead of the graph, we can do this by clicking in the upper-right corner on View As | Graph. This will open a drop-down selection menu, where we can select to see the raw values or the latest 500 raw values:
