Xaprb

Gotta love those three-dimensional charts. They sure are shiny! Look at this:

FusionCharts graphs

This is a screenshot of FusionCharts graphs. But wait, on closer inspection: 5 and 7 are the same height? 6 is exactly twice as tall as 2?

Pseudo-three-dimensional charts are the bane of my existence. Tufte would definitely not approve. (If you don’t have The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, you should really get it and give it a read.)

I’ve created a set of Cacti templates for graphing stats about MySQL. While these were based on several other people’s work, there are many improvements. One of them in particular I want to bring up, and I’ll go so far as to say it ought to be a “best practice” for graphing. That is, don’t mix units on a graph.