Beyond Line Charts • Yao Yue • YOW! 2025

This presentation was recorded at YOW! Australia 2025. #GOTOcon #YOW
https://yowcon.com

Yao Yue - Founder of IOP Systems

RESOURCES
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https://macaw.social/@thinkingfish
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaoyue-thinkingfish
http://yaoyue.org

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. And 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. [...]

TIMECODES
00:00 Intro
02:18 Reliability engineer (2025 edition)
04:17 What's a line chart?
05:46 What is good visualization?
08:49 What's my problem with line charts?
09:44 Line charts & telemetry
14:51 What is better?
15:43 What are line charts bad at?
19:28 Depending on the right visualization
26:44 Visualizing defaults
33:40 Timeless schemas
36:53 Outro

Download slides and read the full abstract here:
https://yowcon.com/brisbane-2025/sessions/3883

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#Observability #Telemetry #RealTime #QueryLanguage #Visualization #LineChart #Metadata #YaoYue #YOWcon

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