We’re happy to share a project we’ve been working on that helps us see into our data. It’s a JavaScript toolkit for creating interactive time series graphs, called Rickshaw.

At Shutterstock we use Rickshaw to read A/B tests, to monitor application and site health in real time, to see into dense product metrics, and all sorts of other things.

It has been a primary goal during the development of Rickshaw to keep the API simple. It has also been a primary goal to not obscure what lies beneath. We use Mike Bostock’s wonderful d3 library to manipulate SVG, and those layers stay accessible if you want to get fancy.

Finally, we’ve kept the scope of our problem domain small. Getting started with a simple graph is a couple of lines of JavaScript and HTML. From there we can add new functionality by consuming extensions that come with the library. Here is an example that shows some of them off.

Rickshaw helps us visualize dense time series data. We hope you have similar success if you give it a try. Here’s a listing of examples, and a tutorial to get you started.