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How to Use Grafana Variables to Make More Interactive Dashboard Visualizations

The (All Too Common) Problem: Boring, Kind of Useful, Static Dashboards

Those of us that work with data often want to make useful dashboards that make it easier for ourselves and other people within our team and organization, to gain insight and make sense of the data we collect. 

A common problem I’ve run into (both when creating dashboards and using them as a stakeholder) is that many dashboards aren’t interactive enough for non-technical stakeholders to get their questions answered without asking engineers to write new code or change the underlying queries powering the dashboard. Or worse, stakeholders try to dig into the code and accidentally break things!

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Time Series for Developers: What the Heck Is Time-Series Data?

Developers and companies use time-series data every day whether they know it or not. Whether you're capturing data from IoT sensors, analyzing past market performance, monitoring cloud or application infrastructure, or running an on-demand food delivery app, time-series data helps your business run. But what exactly is time-series data and how is it useful? 

This post seeks to provide answers to those questions and illustrate the power of time-series data in action by looking at a real-world scenario using a public dataset from the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission. First, let’s dive into a few basic concepts to lay the foundation for the queries we’ll write and analyze in the “Let’s Code” section.