Line plots overview

Visualize metrics, customize axes, and compare multiple lines on a plot

Line plots display by default for metrics logged with wandb.Run.log() over time. You can customize a line plot to compare multiple lines, calculate custom axes, and rename labels.

For runs that execute on CoreWeave infrastructure, CoreWeave Mission Control monitors your compute infrastructure. If an error occurs, W&B populates infrastructure information onto your run’s plots in your project’s workspace. For details, see Visualize CoreWeave infrastructure alerts.

Edit line plot settings

This section shows how to edit the settings for an individual line plot panel, all line plot panels in a section, or all line plot panels in a workspace. For comprehensive details about line plot settings, see Line plot reference.

Individual line plot

A line plot’s individual settings override the line plot settings for the section or the workspace. To customize a line plot:

1. Hover your mouse over the panel, then click the gear icon.
2. Within the drawer that appears, select a tab to edit its settings.
3. Click Apply.

Line plot settings are organized into tabs:

• Data: Configure x-axis, y-axis, sampling method, smoothing, outliers, and chart type.
• Grouping: Configure whether and how to group and aggregate runs in the plot.
• Chart: Specify titles for the panel and axes, and configure legend visibility and position.
• Legend: Customize the appearance and content of the panel’s legend.
• Expressions: Add custom calculated expressions for the axes.

For detailed information about each setting, see the Line plot reference.

All line plots in a section

To customize the default settings for all line plots in a section, overriding workspace settings for line plots:

1. Click the section’s gear icon to open its settings.
2. Within the drawer that appears, select the Data or Display preferences tabs to configure the default settings for the section. For details about each Data setting, see the Line plot reference. For details about each display preference, refer to Configure section layout.

All line plots in a workspace

To customize the default settings for all line plots in a workspace:

1. Click the workspace’s settings, which has a gear with the label Settings.
2. Click Line plots.
3. Within the drawer that appears, select the Data or Display preferences tabs to configure the default settings for the workspace.
   • For details about each Data setting, see the Line plot reference.
   • For details about each Display preferences section, refer to Workspace display preferences. At the workspace level, you can configure the default Zooming behavior for line plots. This setting controls whether to synchronize zooming across line plots with a matching x-axis key. Disabled by default.

Visualize average values on a plot

If you have several different experiments and you’d like to see the average of their values on a plot, you can use the Grouping feature in the table. Click “Group” above the run table and select “All” to show averaged values in your graphs.

Here is what the graph looks like before averaging:

The proceeding image shows a graph that represents average values across runs using grouped lines.

Visualize NaN value on a plot

You can also plot NaN values including PyTorch tensors on a line plot with wandb.Run.log(). For example:

with wandb.init() as run:
    # Log a NaN value
    run.log({"test": float("nan")})

Compare multiple metrics on one chart

1. Select the Add panels button in the top right corner of the page.
2. From the left panel that appears, expand the Evaluation dropdown.
3. Select Run comparer

Change the color of the line plots

Sometimes the default color of runs is not helpful for comparison. To help overcome this, wandb provides two instances with which one can manually change the colors.

From the run table

Each run is given a random color by default upon initialization.

Upon clicking any of the colors, a color palette appears from which we can manually choose the color we want.

From the chart legend settings

1. Hover your mouse over the panel you want to edit its settings for.
2. Select the pencil icon that appears.
3. Choose the Legend tab.

Visualize on different x axes

If you’d like to see the absolute time that an experiment has taken, or see what day an experiment ran, you can switch the x axis. Here’s an example of switching from steps to relative time and then to wall time.

To use a custom x-axis, log the metric in the same call to wandb.Run.log() where you log the y-axis.

Zoom

Click and drag a rectangle to zoom vertically and horizontally at the same time. This changes the x-axis and y-axis zoom.

Hide chart legend

Turn off the legend in the line plot with this simple toggle:

Create a run metrics notification

Use Automations to notify your team when a run metric meets a condition you specify. An automation can post to a Slack channel or run a webhook.

From a line plot, you can quickly create a run metrics notification for the metric it shows:

1. Hover over the panel, then click the bell icon.
2. Configure the automation using the basic or advanced configuration controls. For example, apply a run filter to limit the scope of the automation, or configure an absolute threshold.

Learn more about Automations.