Collecting and examining time-stamped data is a really common use case. Maybe you’re tracking soil moisture on your farm, or temperature data from each room in a building. You’ll want to keep a historical record, look for trends, and trigger other actions when appropriate. These services can be used to build a beautiful dashboard for your hobby project, an interface for monitoring the status of industrial system, or even an analytics back end for testing and debugging a consumer product in the field.

We’ll look at two examples: Initial State and Plotly.

Initial State

Initial State provides analytics and custom dashboards for time-series data. You can post event data to the service using REST either directly from your device, or as an output from another service such as PubNub or Carriots (more on these later). You could also use this service to import comma separated values (CSV) log data that you captured from a device you’re debugging or prototyping.

Plotly

Plotly can be used to create interactive charts and custom dashboards. Most of their products are focused on data science and visualization, but they also have an REST API and an HTTP-based streaming endpoint which you can use to publish device data. The streaming endpoint allows your devices to send a series of events to the service using a single long-term connection to the server. They provide libraries and example projects for Arduino and Raspberry Pi, which might be just what you need for that project you’ve been thinking about building.