Beyond Line Charts: Why Some Diversity in Telemetry Visualization Is Long Overdue

QCon San Francisco 2025

Session

Beyond Line Charts: Why Some Diversity in Telemetry Visualization Is Long Overdue

Monday Nov 17 / 11:45AM PST, Seacliff ABC at Hyatt Regency, San Francisco

Abstract

For decades, visualization of service metrics overwhelmingly converges to line charts. The time-centric nature of real-time telemetry further cemented this phenomenon via storage layouts and domain-specific query languages.

But what questions do we, as service operators, ask or should ask? Can we find all the answers in line charts? Obviously my answer to that last question is no. I want to show you how some of the most valuable operational questions are much better served by presenting, and perhaps processing, telemetry data and metadata in alternative formats. 

It is easy for software developers to treat operations as an afterthought. But running software well is a serious engineering challenge in its own right. By taking a fresh and principled look at service telemetry, we can better appreciate both the breadth and depth of this fascinating problem that transcends programming languages, software/hardware abstractions, and application domains.
 

76% senior dev or higher
1:11 speaker ratio
60+ practitioners

QCon San Francisco 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.

Share

From the same track

Monday 17 November

10:35 Seacliff ABC Session Platform Engineering Continuous Delivery for Foundational Platforms Ian Nowland CEO @Junction Labs, Author of O'Reilly's Platform Engineering, Previously SVP Core Engineering at Datadog and Leader of AWS Nitro 11:45 Seacliff ABC Session Beyond Line Charts: Why Some Diversity in Telemetry Visualization Is Long Overdue Yao Yue Founder & Chief Executive Officer @IOP Systems, Platform Engineer, Distributed System Aficionado, Cache Expert 13:35 Ballroom BC Session Microservices Platforms: When Team Topologies Meets Microservices Patterns Chris Richardson Creator of microservices.io, Java Champion, & Core Microservices Thoughtleader 14:45 Seacliff D Unconference Unconference: Modern Platform Engineering and Dev Enablement 15:55 Ballroom BC Session Platform Engineering: Lessons from the Rise and Fall of eBay Velocity Randy Shoup SVP Engineering @Thrive Market, Previously @eBay, @Google, @Stitch Fix 17:05 Ballroom BC Session Resilience Enhancing Reliability Using Service-Level Prioritized Load Shedding at Netflix Anirudh Mendiratta, Benjamin Fedorka