ds-viz-pie

name

ds-viz-pie

description

Splunk Dashboard Studio splunk.pie visualization — pie and donut charts for part-of-whole breakdowns with a small number of slices. Provides patterns for executive summaries, allow/block donuts, collapseThreshold for long-tail rollup, and chrome-stripped donuts paired with single-value KPI overlays. Use when the user asks about pie charts, donuts, share of total, slice colours, or breakdown by category in Splunk Dashboard Studio.

splunk.pie — pie and donut

Verified against Splunk Cloud 10.4.2604 + Splunk Enterprise 10.2.1. Live test bench: ds_viz_pie_dark / ds_viz_pie_light.

splunk.pie is the dedicated chart for part-of-whole with a small number of categories. The same visualization renders both pies and donuts — toggle with showDonutHole.

When to use

• The message is share of total and there are at most 3–5 meaningful categories.
• Donut variant (showDonutHole: true) for KPI-style breakdown panels — the eye reads arc length more accurately than slice area.
• collapseThreshold to bucket the long tail into a single Other slice — converts a 12-slice pie into a 4-slice pie without losing the total.

When NOT to use

• Trend over time → splunk.area / splunk.column with stackMode: "stacked100".
• Ranking — humans read bars much faster than pie slices. Reach for splunk.bar with a top-N sort.
• >7 raw slices — by then nothing is readable. Either collapseThreshold it down or switch chart family.

See ds-pick-viz for the full decision matrix.

Quick start

{
  "type": "splunk.pie",
  "title": "Revenue by region",
  "dataSources": { "primary": "ds_basic" },
  "options": {
    "showDonutHole": true,
    "collapseThreshold": 0.05,
    "collapseLabel": "Other",
    "labelDisplay": "valuesAndPercentage"
  }
}

| stats sum(revenue) as revenue by region | sort - revenue

Pie has no built-in sort — slice order = SPL output order. Always | sort - <value>.

Do / Don't

✅ Do	❌ Don't
Sort SPL: | sort - <value> so largest slice is first.	Trust Splunk to sort — pie has no sort option.
Executive default: labelDisplay: "valuesAndPercentage" + donut + collapseThreshold: 0.05.	labelDisplay: "values" (counts only) for executive views — percentages are usually what executives want.
Colours: seriesColorsByField keyed by exact label (case-sensitive).	seriesColors array — survives SPL filter changes badly.
Long tail: collapseThreshold: 0.05 (5%) folds <5% slices into Other.	collapseThreshold: 5 — it's a fraction (0–1), not a percent. 5 collapses every slice.
Two-slice donut: showDonutHole: true with two semantic colours (allow=green, block=red).	Use a 2-slice pie for a binary metric — the donut hole gives the eye an anchor.
Tiny panel + donut: labelDisplay: "off" to defer to the legend.	Force on-slice labels in a panel <280 px wide — labels overlap.
Background: backgroundColor: "transparent" for KPI overlay (donut + singlevalue stacked).	Set defaults.visualizations.global.backgroundColor and expect pie to inherit — pie doesn't.

What pie does NOT have

(Don't invent options that aren't in the 10.4 PDF table.)

• No axes, ticks, grid lines, log scale, or yAxis* of any kind.
• No legendDisplay — the legend renders automatically and cannot be moved or hidden through dashboard options.
• No annotations, overlays, dual-axis, or stacking.
• No dataValuesDisplay — on-slice display is controlled by labelDisplay.

If you reach for any of those, you're in the wrong viz family — see ds-pick-viz.

See also

• PATTERNS.md — 12 verified patterns: minimal, valuesAndPercentage, donut, semantic colours, collapseThreshold, two-slice, single-hue emphasis, chrome-stripped overlay, aggressive long-tail rollup.
• OPTIONS.md — every documented pie option (the full list is short).
• GOTCHAS.md — sort, fraction-vs-percent, label case-sensitivity, panel-size traps.
• ds-viz-bar — better for ranking and >5 categories.
• ds-viz-singlevalue — pair with chrome-stripped donut for the "big number with breakdown ring" KPI pattern.
• ds-ref-design-principles — colour discipline, why bars beat pies most of the time.