A method for reporting data network monitoring information. The method includes accessing performance metric values for a network component and generating a trace of graph data points for the performance metric values. For a range of the trace, a histogram is built and displayed corresponding to the graph data points. For a user interface, a performance monitoring display is generated including a graph of the trace relative to an x-axis and a y-axis and a representation of the histogram. The graph data points in the trace corresponds to a histogram previously built from the performance metric values, and the trace is generated by determining and plotting an average value of each of the graph data point histograms. The building of the histogram for the performance monitoring display involves combining the graph data point histograms corresponding to the graph data points in the selected histogram range.