Time axis (x-axis) logarithmic display

[philjb]

Proposal:

Often, I want to see detail in the now() data and compare it to the same data from yesterday or last week to see what the trend is. Is now() increasing or decreasing compare to the recent past trend? Is the overall level high or low or similar to the history.

In the cloud2 ui today, I can switch between a 1hr time range and a 48hr time range to compare, but I can't view the 1hr and the 48hr together: Yes, on the 48hr i get the recent 1hr too but it is 2% of the time x-axis so the detail is lost. A 48hr query usually has more aggressive downsampling so the now time is just a few points (adaptive downsampling is outside this FR).

With a log time x-axis option, I can expand the recent time (1hr) to take up more screen real-estate and compress the more distant past. This give me the detail of the near real time and preserves the trends of the relatively far past.

This FR is a twist on #781.

Current behavior:
For the Graph cell type, the chart only plots linear axises linearly.

Desired behavior:
see preamble

Alternatives considered:
I "can" write a flux query that would do this effectively but it would mean i'd have to translate the timestamps to some other unit (log timestamp) which is then not directly "wall time" anymore. I would have to translate the log timestamp to the actual wall clock time outside the ui. While possible, the added difficultly of the flux query and the translation outside the ui make this significant work.

"adaptive downsampling with query awareness" would help here too but that is a more complicated solution needed primarily for performance reasons. A log x-axis would provide a purely presentation layer improvement.

Use case:

We care about near real time more than older history. Our charts should reflect this reality by giving preference to recent data more than historical data by "weighting" it more in the display. Have recent data show 50% of the chart space and all older data in the other 50%. Non linear time x-axis does this.

[pbiering]

That is beside the in 2.x disappeared log scale a very interesting FR.