Std deviation definitely helps a lot, still often not as good as percentiles, was actually thinking about adding some of that in the post but it was already getting so long. It's funny how things you think are simple sometimes take the most effort to explain, definitely found that on this one.
Yeah -- std deviation has a similar problem to the mean in that it doesn't give you a full picture unless the distribution is close to normal / gaussian.
We've been meaning to add IQR as an accessor function for these, may have to go back and do it...the frequency trails [1] stuff from Brendan Gregg also goes into some of this and it's really cool as a visualization.
Barchart is basically your percentiles (just more of them) so why not show it? Bars and whiskers could be more complicated for them but still the same sort of data
Std deviation definitely helps a lot, still often not as good as percentiles, was actually thinking about adding some of that in the post but it was already getting so long. It's funny how things you think are simple sometimes take the most effort to explain, definitely found that on this one.