April 2022 Summaries

Edeva, a Swedish company founded in 2009, creates powerful solutions for smart cities using IoT devices to collect data on traffic flow, vehicle classification, bike and pedestrian data, number plate data, gyroscopic data, environmental data, alarm data, status data, and administrative data. The team uses TimescaleDB as the main database in their smart city system, leveraging continuous aggregations to deliver lightning-fast dashboards. With TimescaleDB, they can easily onboard new developers and get accurate percentile values without querying raw data. Edeva's software solutions, such as Actibump and EdevaLive, have made a significant impact on the way people live in smart cities, providing valuable insights for decision-making and improving safety and efficiency. The company is now exploring ways to reduce raw data storage and integrate TimescaleDB with a data lake.

Prometheus metrics provide a way for engineers to monitor software properties over time, allowing them to track performance, consumption, and productivity. These metrics can be used to detect when systems don't perform as expected. Prometheus defines four types of metrics: counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries. Counters are used for measurements that only increase, while gauges measure values that can arbitrarily increase or decrease. Histograms represent a distribution of measurements, dividing the range into intervals called buckets. Summaries provide additional information about request durations and response sizes, including quantiles. When choosing between histograms and summaries, consider whether you need aggregated percentiles and whether accuracy is important. Ultimately, histograms are preferred for their flexibility and ability to aggregate percentiles, while summaries are useful when averages or other metrics are sufficient.

Timescale recently participated in several events, including hosting its second Community Day, where attendees discussed databases and observability. The company also released new versions of tobs and Timescale Cloud, which include features such as OpenTelemetry auto-instrumentation and database replication. Additionally, Timescale Cloud now supports multi-user accounts, and the company has expanded its availability to the AWS eu-central-1 region in Frankfurt, Germany. New technical content includes videos and tutorials on topics such as deploying an observability stack with tobs and using OpenTelemetry and SQL to understand distributed systems. The company also highlighted various community events and initiatives, including a #WomenInTech interview series and automated mocking using API traffic from Speedscale.