Kibana can do visualizations of distributions with elastic data. I agree it is the best way to get a clear picture of latency and other metrics within a period

Kibana can do visualizations of distributions with elastic data. I agree it is the best way to get a clear picture of latency and other metrics within a period of time. I think percentiles over time, given consistent sample sizes per bucket, can be good for understanding change over time. In general I think of histograms for these sort of metrics providing higher fidelity of value, where as stats over time can provide higher fidelity of time (for roughly the same storage). Animating the distribution over time can be pretty neat, but not common feature in my space (but can be done with a little R code). I imagine 3 axis (3d) histograms over time can make some neat visualizations but have never experimented with that, and would probably want to slice or rotate the plot. More common are heatmaps where the darkness of the color is your third axis. Kind of like viewing the 3d plot of histograms over time from above where the cubes are partly transparent and get darker the deeper they are.