If you read this blog, I am assuming you are at least familiar with the Analytic functions in the ZFSSA. They are basically amazing, very powerful and deep.

However, you may not be aware of some great, hidden functions inside the Analytic screen.

Once you open a metric, the toolbar looks like this:

Now, I’m not going over every tool, as we have done that before, and you can hover your mouse over them and they will tell you what they do. But…. Check this out.
Open a metric (CPU Percent Utilization works fine), and click on the “Hour” button, which is the 2^nd clock icon. That’s easy, you are now looking at the last hour of data. Now, hold down your ‘Shift’ key, and click it again. Now you are looking at 2 hours of data. Hold down Shift and click it again, and you are looking at 3 hours of data. Are you catching on yet?
You can do this with not only the ‘Hour’ button, but also with the ‘Minute’, ‘Day’, ‘Week’, and the ‘Month’ buttons. Very cool. It also works with the ‘Show Minimum’ and ‘Show Maximum’ buttons, allowing you to go to the next iteration of either of those.

One last button you can Shift-click is the handy ‘Drill’ button. This button usually drills down on one specific aspect of your metric. If you Shift-click it, it will display a “Rainbow Highlight” of the current metric. This works best if this metric has many ‘Range Average’ items in the left-hand window. Give it a shot.

Also, one will sometimes click on a certain second of data in the graph, like this:

 In this case, I clicked 4:57 and 21 seconds, and the 'Range Average' on the left went away, and was replaced by the time stamp. It seems at this point to some people that you are now stuck, and can not get back to an average for the whole chart. However, you can actually click on the actual time stamp of "4:57:21" right above the chart. Even though your mouse does not change into the typical browser finger that most links look like, you can click it, and it will change your range back to the full metric.

Another trick you may like is to save a certain view or look of a group of graphs. Most of you know you can save a worksheet, but did you know you could Sync them, Pause them, and then Save it? This will save the paused state, allowing you to view it forever the way you see it now. 

Heatmaps. Heatmaps are cool, and look like this: 

Some metrics use them and some don't. If you have one, and wish to zoom it vertically, try this. Open a heatmap metric like my example above (I believe every metric that deals with latency will show as a heatmap). Select one or two of the ranges on the left. Click the "Change Outlier Elimination" button. Click it again and check out what it does. 

Enjoy. Perhaps my next blog entry will be the best Analytic metrics to keep your eyes on, and how you can use the Alerts feature to watch them for you.

Steve