This is the first post in a series about visualizing monitoring data. This post focuses on timeseries graphs. Observability is not just about having monitoring data—that data must be easily available and interpretable. Choosing the right visualization for your data is an important part of providing human-readable representations of the health and performance of your systems. There is no one-size-fits-all solution: you can see different things in the same metric with different graph types. To help you effectively visualize your metrics, this first post explores four different types of timeseries graphs, which have time on the x-axis and metric values on the y-axis: Line graphs Stacked area graphs Bar graphs Heat maps For each graph type, we’ll explain how it works, when to use it, and when to use something else. Line graphs Line graphs are the simplest way to translate metric data into visuals, but often they’re used by default when a different graph would be m