Visualizing data

The time-series data stored in TimescaleDB can be easily displayed on graphs. TimescaleDB is compatible with visualization tools that work with PostgreSQL. This means that regardless of whether you are creating custom visualizations embedded in your applications or using off-the-shelf visualization tools to expose data across your business organization, you can choose from a wide selection of tools.

Grafana

Grafana is an open-source visualization tool popular in the DevOps monitoring space, although it can also be used across the organization to visualize time-series metrics. Getting started with Grafana is simple. Download and install Grafana. Then, add a new PostgreSQL data source that points to your TimescaleDB instance. Queries run through Grafana will continue to benefit from the performance improvements built into TimescaleDB. In fact, this data source was built by TimescaleDB engineers, and it is designed to take advantage of the databases’ time-series capabilities.

WARNING:Grafana expects data received to be ordered by time. When querying Grafana using SQL, you must include the ORDER BY time statement so that results are guaranteed to be ordered. Grafana draws the points as they appear in the returned query. If data comes in unordered, you may observe inconsistencies in both graphs and Grafana functions.

Other Visualization Tools

TimescaleDB also works with popular visualization software solutions that allow users across your organization to analyze and visualize data. Users can use these platforms to run business intelligence reports, power machine learning models, and build custom dashboards. Many of these tools also allow you to embed dashboards into applications, making it quick and easy to offer analytical features to your users.

Some popular visualization tools that work with TimescaleDB include:

• Tableau: get started here
• PowerBI: get started here
• Looker: get started here
• Periscope: get started here
• Mode: read more here
• Chartio: read more here

TIP:If it works with PostgreSQL, it works with TimescaleDB. TimescaleDB looks just like PostgreSQL on the outside, but offers optimizations built deep into the system that speed up time-series queries.