Timescale Newsletter Roundup: June Edition

Lacey Butler -

Check out the latest and greatest from Team Timescale in June, including more ways to up-level your Grafana prowess, 3 new product releases, replays from our all things open data community meetup, TimescaleDB tips, and oh so much more.

We’re always releasing new features, creating new documentation and tutorials, and hosting virtual sessions to help developers do amazing things with their data. And, to make it easy for our community members to discover and get the resources they need to power their projects, teams, or business with analytics, we round up our favorite new pieces in our biweekly newsletter.

We’re on a mission to teach the world about time-series data, supporting and growing communities around the world.

...sharing educational resources as broadly as possible is one way to do just that :).

New technical content, videos & tutorials

[Technical Session Replay] Guide to Grafana 101 Part III: Interactivity, Templating & Sharing>>

Our Grafana expert @avthars strikes again, taking you through what, why, and how to use Grafana templates and variables to build better dashboards, in less time,  demo’ing 3 different scenarios: IoT, DevOps, and a large team project, and more.

[RSVP] Guide to Grafana Part IV: Tackling Advanced Topics & FAQ >>

To wrap up our Guide to Grafana series, @avthars will tackle the big and small nuances that can make it tricky to monitor and analyze your data.

He’ll demo tips, tricks, and workarounds to common problems - like switching between aggregate views, graphing recurring time periods, and combining templates + alerts.

  • 📅 RSVP for July 15
  • We’d love to see you live, but, if you can’t make it, we’ll send the recording + demos to all registrants shortly afterwards.

[Recap + Q & A] Guide to Grafana 101 Part II: Getting Started with Alerts >>

In case you missed Part II of our Grafana series, @avthars breaks down how alerting, alert states, and triggers work in Grafana (30+ mins of demo!).

You’ll learn how to define and configure 3 kinds of alerts, send notifications via PagerDuty, Slack, and OpsGenie, and customize for your projects.


New #remote-friendly events & community

[Community Meetup Replay #1] DataPub #4: Cataloguing the World: Tweets, Medicine & Beyond

Catch up on this month’s meetup to get pro tips for using Twitter Developer Labs (including new features like Annotations) and learn how fellow open data enthusiasts built DrugCentral to catalog pharmaceutical data for anyone to access.

[Community Replay #2]: DataPub #3: Solving Urban Mysteries >>

Chris Whong details how he aggregates New York City's subway station entry and exit data to understand ridership trends, and Jonathan Leek tells us about his teams’ work to build an open source framework that makes property data accessible and usable (aka a "Carfax for Housing”).

Etc.

[Product Updates] TimescaleDB Multi-Node Beta 5 Now Available >> We continue to march toward the official launch of our multi-node product later this summer, and we just released a new beta version that’s available for any and all community feedback.

V5 includes the milestones of PG 12 support and one singular codebase for both single and multi-node deployments – it’s all just one TimescaleDB now!

[Product Updates] New Prometheus Connector Alpha v4 >>

We’ve been hard at work developing our new Prometheus Connector, based on community feedback and our experience monitoring our internal tools and systems.

The latest version includes various improvements, including 2x+ faster ingest rates, improved memory performance, decreased CPU utilization, and bugfixes.

[Product Updates]: TimescaleDB 1.7.1 Release >>

We recently shipped TimescaleDB 1.7.1, a maintenance release that fixes various bugs in two of our newest capabilities: real-time aggregates and PG12 support.

If you’re using multiple continuous aggregates, we deem it a high priority upgrade, and medium priority for those who aren’t.

  • 🐯 See GitHub changelog for full details, community contributions, and our release playlist (and, while you’re on GitHub, give us a ⭐ if you like what you see. We appreciate it!).
  • 📬 Subscribe to our Release Notes to get the latest updates as soon as they’re available.


[TimescaleDB Tip #1]: Check out our FAQ >>

We’ve compiled a (non-exhaustive) list of commonly asked questions for handy reference, based on what we typically hear from community members and customers.

Check it out to brush up on the basics or to learn more about how TimescaleDB works.

[TimescaleDB Tip #2]: Recommendations for setting up your architecture with AWS & TimescaleDB  >>

This oldie-but-goodie post breaks down 5 common ways to use your AWS services with TimescaleDB and why you’d select each one. Goal: you find the option that works best for your project, team, or organization.

[Reading List]: Writing IT Metrics from Netdata to TimescaleDB  >> TimescaleDB community member and Timescale Hero Mahlon shares how and why he developed Netdata-TSrelay - a tool to connect and store Netdata metrics in TimescaleDB. Learn how he and his team at LAIKA consolidate years’ worth of animation studio metrics (8M metrics an hour!) in one place to analyze and allocate resources for future films.

[Reading List]: ICYMI TimescaleDB multi-node will be freely available (#1 on Hacker News) >>

Last month, we announced that our multi-node offering (currently in beta) will be available to developers everywhere, completely free of charge. Ajay details our plans, why we chose to focus on community growth v. immediate revenue, what to expect next, and how to get started now.

[Timescale Team Fun]: if you're looking for new ideas to jazz up your #remote-work life, Timescale People Manager Mel continues to come up with new ways for Team Timescale to connect and bond.

...and you're welcome (and encouraged!) to "steal" these ideas for your own team, or use them as inspiration for our own bonding activities.

🎶 Team bonding activities go asynchronous w/ mini-Slack challenges, like "Name that Lyric"

🗃️ Timescale Family Feud prep - see Building a Remote-First Team Culture (aka virtual event ideas you’re welcome to steal) for game play details + more ideas


Timescalers' new Group Gametime favorite = Guesspionage (poll questions that "test your knowledge about the human condition"

Wrapping Up

And, that concludes this month’s newsletter roundup. We’ll continue to release new content, events, and more - posting monthly updates for everyone.

If you’d like to get updates as soon as they’re available, subscribe to our newsletter (2x monthly emails, prepared with 💛and no fluff or jargon, promise).

Happy building!