Build a bar chart in Grafana

A bar chart displays data using bars, each representing a specific category. A bar chart is a great comparison tool for data visualization, as it’s easy to see which item’s column or bar is longer or shorter. Bar charts use two axes: vertical and horizontal. The longer a bar is, the greater its value. A bar chart is a good way to compare items between different groups.

Bar charts can answer questions like:

  • Which stock has the highest traded volume today?
  • What was the transaction volume distribution of stocks last week?
  • How many students in grade A are above a certain age range?

To plot a bar chart, Grafana requires only one data frame. You need to have at least one string field, which is used as the category for an X or Y axis, and one or more numerical fields. You can also provide multiple value columns, if you want to plot multiple bar charts in a single panel.

This tutorial shows you how to:

There are a few different kinds of bar charts to choose from, including vertical, horizontal, and stacked bar charts. All of these types are covered in this tutorial.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

If you are new to Grafana, see the Grafana tutorials to get familiar with creating your first dashboard and visualizations. Also see this tutorial on adding variables to Grafana.

The examples in this section use these variables and Grafana functions:

  • $symbol: a variable used to filter results by stock symbols.
  • $__timeFrom()::timestamptz & $__timeTo()::timestamptz: Grafana variables. You change the values of these variables by using the dashboard’s date chooser when viewing your graph.
  • $bucket_interval: the interval size to pass to the time_bucket function when aggregating data.

Check out this video for a step-by-step walk-through on creating bar chart in Grafana:

Create a bar chart with preaggregated data

Create a bar chart visualization using the data in the table stocks_real_time.

Creating a bar chat with preaggregated data

  1. In the query editor, use this SQL to query a bar chart dataset. Use the variable $bucket interval for the time period covered by the bar chart:

    1. SELECT
    3.     time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time) AS time,
    5.     symbol,
    7.     AVG(price) AS price
    9. FROM stocks_real_time srt
    11. WHERE symbol IN ($symbol)
    13.     AND time >= $__timeFrom()::timestamptz AND time < $__timeTo()::timestamptz
    15. GROUP BY time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time), symbol
    17. ORDER BY time;

  2. In the Grafana dashboard, in the Dashboard variable field, select a stock to graph. Adjust the time range of the dashboard if needed. Make sure the returned data has a column named time that contains timestamps. The timestamps should be in ascending order. Otherwise, you get an error. The returned data looks like this:

    Screenshot of the table view of valid time-series data for Google stock.

  1. In the Visualizations field, select Bar chart. Grafana turns the query into a bar chart. This example shows a vertical bar chart price distribution of Google stock, which ranges between $2836 and $2108 within a specific period:

    Screenshot of the vertical bar chart produced by Grafana. The vertical bar chart represents the price of Google in the past 2 months.

  1. You can convert from a vertical bar chart to a horizontal one to get room for a longer label along the vertical axis. In the dashboard, navigate to the bar chart section. In the Orientaton section, click horizontal. The horizontal bar chart looks like this:

    Screenshot of the horizontal bar chart produced by Grafana. The horizontal bar chart represents the price of google in the past 2 months.

Create multiple bar charts

If you want to compare the distributions of 4 or more different stocks, you can create a panel containing multiple bar charts. The database returns the transactions for all selected values, and Grafana buckets them in separate bar charts.

Creating multiple bar charts in a single panel

  1. Fetch all company symbols from the dataset in the Getting Started Tutorial with this query:

    1. SELECT
    3.      DISTINCT symbol FROM company ORDER BY symbol ASC;

  2. In the Grafana dashboard, navigate to the settings page for your panel. In the Variables section:

    • In the Name field, give your symbol a name.
    • In the Type field, select Query.
    • In the Selection options field, enable multi-value.

  3. At the psql prompt, update the earlier query to allow you to use multiple symbols. You can select as many symbols as you want to compare:

    1. SELECT
    3.        time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time) AS time,
    5.        symbol,
    7.        AVG(price) AS price
    9.    FROM stocks_real_time srt
    11.    WHERE symbol IN ($symbol)
    13.        AND time >= $__timeFrom()::timestamptz AND time < $__timeTo()::timestamptz
    15.    GROUP BY time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time), symbol
    17.    ORDER BY time;

  4. In Grafana, refresh the dashboard. The returned data looks like this:

    Screenshot of the table view of valid time series data for four different stocks.

  1. And the displayed graph looks like this:
  3. ![Screenshot of the multiple bar chart produced by Grafana. The multiple bar chart represents the price of four different stocks in the past 1 month.](/projects/timescaledb-2.9-en/7a9ba273f67737953bde02b5158ed9fc.png)

  1. In the graph you just created, you can see the 5 different stocks, but it is difficult to differentiate them. To tell them apart, you can adjust the color of each stock by clicking the legend to the left of each line, and picking a color for each bar:

    Screenshot of Grafana plot, showing 5 bar chart of stock values in green, blue, red, purple and orange.

Create a stacked bar chart

You can use a stacked bar chart to show how different stock divides into smaller categories, and what impact each part has on the total amount.

The previous examples used vertical, horizontal, and multiple bar charts with price transactions. In this section, you see the trading volume of each stock using a bucket interval.

The stock_real_time hypertable contains a column with the daily cumulative traded volume. This helps to calculate the volume of data for each bucket.

Creating a stacked bar chart

  1. At the psql prompt, update the earlier query to find the maximum day_volume value for a symbol within a bucket. Then, subtract each maximum from the previous bucket’s maximum. The difference gives the traded volume for that bucket:

    1. SELECT
    3.        time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time) AS time,
    5.        symbol,
    7.        MAX(day_volume) - LAG(MAX(day_volume), 1) OVER(
    9.            PARTITION BY symbol
    11.            ORDER BY time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time)
    13.        ) AS bucket_volume
    15.    FROM stocks_real_time srt
    17.    WHERE symbol IN ($symbol)
    19.        AND time >= $__timeFrom()::timestamptz AND time < $__timeTo()::timestamptz
    21.    GROUP BY time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time), symbol
    23.    ORDER BY time_bucket('$bucket_interval', time), symbol;

  2. In the Grafana dashboard, convert your multiple bar chart to a stacked bar chart. In the symbol drop-down menu, select all the stocks you want to compare. On the right side of the panel, click the bar chart drop-down. In the stacking field, select normal, and refresh the panel. The stacked bar chart view shows a 1-day bucket with a 1-hour bucket interval. The volume calculation is valid mostly with the trading day:

    Screenshot of Grafana dashboard, showing a stacked bar chart.

note

If you go beyond a single trading day, you might get results that don’t look very good, or you might get no data returned. To fix this, focus your calculation on a single trading day instead.

There are plenty of great ways to visualize data using TimescaleDB and Grafana, check out the other Grafana visualization tutorials.