NetVoyant Rollups: Sums, Maximum, Percentiles, etc.

For most situations out there, the default rollup is perfectly fine.  What i mean is that when you add an expression to a dataset, the default rollup (which is an average) is exactly what someone would be looking for in a rollup.  If i show top interfaces for an hour, I'd like to sort those interfaces by the highest average utilization, which means i want NV to take an average of the utilization data points during that hour.

However, in some situations, it may be more accurate to calculate a different rollup.  For example, if i wanted to, i could have NV calculate both the average value of all the data points collected in the last hour and also calculate the standard deviation so that i know how consistent my utilization is.  Higher standard deviation means there are at least some points that are far away from the average.  I could also have NV calculate the maximum or a percentile of all the points from the last hour.  By adding max and percentile to a view, i can easily see more clearly what is happening on an interface.

One other situation is volume.  If you're polling some OID for some kind of volume (KB or MB), the first thing you should do in your expression is put it in bytes.  This allows you to take advantage of the auto scaling feature in the views.  This means that instead of showing numbers like 12000000 along the dependent axis, NV can display something like 12.  You'd then put {Scale} in the axis label so that KB, MB, GB, etc. is displayed indicating the unit.
The next thing you'd do for volume is change the rollup.  Obviously if you're tracking volume, having an average of all the points collected in the last hour is useless.  What you really want is a sum of the volume in the last hour.  To do this, remove all rollup types.

Did i mention how to do that?  I guess i didn't.  Edit the expression and click the advanced button.  Uncheck all the checkboxes so that the rollup is a sum instead of an average.

Another trick about rates:
If you're polling an OID and want to convert it to rate, create a new expression and divide the expression by the variable 'duration'.  Duration is always equal to the number of seconds in a poll cycle.  Technically it's the number of seconds since the last poll, so you do have to be a little careful about that.
Again, if your OID is in some unit like KB, convert it to bits (KB*1024*8).  Then when you divide by duration, you get bits per second.  By setting the view auto-scale to rate, NV will automatically convert it to the needed value (Kbps, Mbps, Gbps, etc.).