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 https://bsky.app/profile/yaoyue.org https://macaw.social/@thinkingfish https://x.com/thinkingfish https://github.com/thinkingfish 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 RECOMMENDED BOOKS Charity Majors, Liz Fong-Jones & George Miranda • Observability Engineering • https://amzn.to/38scbma Kelly Shortridge & Aaron Rinehart • Security Chaos Engineering • https://www.verica.io/sce-book Nora Jones & Casey Rosenthal • Chaos Engineering • https://amzn.to/3hUmuAH Mikolaj Pawlikowski • Chaos Engineering • https://amzn.to/2SQ5Olf Russ Miles • Learning Chaos Engineering • https://amzn.to/3hCiUe8 https://bsky.app/profile/gotocon.com https://twitter.com/GOTOcon https://www.linkedin.com/company/goto- https://www.instagram.com/goto_con https://www.facebook.com/GOTOConferences #Observability #Telemetry #RealTime #QueryLanguage #Visualization #LineChart #Metadata #YaoYue #YOWcon CHANNEL MEMBERSHIP BONUS Join this channel to get early access to videos & other perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCs_tLP3AiwYKwdUHpltJPuA/join Looking for a unique learning experience? Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket at https://gotopia.tech Sign up for updates and specials at https://gotopia.tech/newsletter SUBSCRIBE TO OUR CHANNEL - new videos posted almost daily. https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences/?sub_confirmation=1