Calculation and Summarization Not Able to Occur Because there Is no Data in Poor Quality Column

[jesse-grafana]

Discussed in #891

^{Originally posted by jesse-grafana June 24, 2024}
I have a GE customer trying to use the Infinity plugin to calculate call metrics from Aternity api and calculate into columns using a table plugin. This works if we have values for "poor quality" and "Total calls," but in the scenario "poor quality" has no data, the column does not present itself. There is no equivalent of zero vector you would have in a prom datasource. Is there some way to conjure a calculated column with no value so it's not just absent? Tried the no data option of null, etc.

So, if no data exists in the column, it no longer adds that column to the report. This is a bad experience because when summarizing calls and their quality, you cannot show that there were no "XXXX" column names.

Example: In this instance, the column does not appear on the report if there are no "Poor Quality" marked records. A call center or quality control group needs to summarize all points even if there are none in the data. Without it in the report's data, they cannot report with dashboards for executives because they no longer see that field. Just because there is no data, does not mean it should be displayed in the data. I believe this could be a UI bug as there is no option to mark display/do not display if column is null option. There should be a toggle to allow the user to toggle if they want to show a null value column or not.

If we can solve this without using customer data, it would be a huge win for this customer because they are 97% ready to go live with a few Grafana features, and this is one of the last few issues holding that up.