Problem
A chart shows the overall shape, but people sometimes need an exact value and timestamp without leaving it.
Solution
Show the value, unit, time, and series name for the selected point. Keep the detail compact and position it so it does not hide the area being inspected.
For comparisons, offer values from relevant series at the same time. A shared crosshair can align that position across related charts.
Provide keyboard and touch access to the same information. Use a click or separate panel for longer explanations and actions that need to remain open.
Use when
People usually read a chart for its shape but occasionally need exact values.
Don’t use when
The precise value is the primary need. If viewers hover every time, they wanted a table. And never put anything essential behind hover alone, because hover does not exist on touch and does not exist for keyboard navigation.
Trade-offs
Hover controls can be hard to discover and are unavailable on touch screens. Large tooltips obscure data, and cursor-following panels can flicker near edges. Important information needs another accessible path.
Checklist
- Does the tooltip show one series or all of them, and can the viewer choose?
- If all, are they sorted by value rather than alphabetically?
- Is there a shared crosshair across panels, and does it align to the same timestamp?
- Are units and full precision shown, rather than the axis’s rounded version?
- Is the timestamp in a stated timezone?
- Does the tooltip avoid covering the point it describes?
- What is the touch equivalent, and does it exist?
- Is any of this reachable by keyboard?
- Does the tooltip stay legible at twelve series, and what happens at fifty?
- Is anything only available on hover that a viewer would need to find first?
Compare
Grafana treats the tooltip as a panel option with single, all and hidden modes plus a shared crosshair set at dashboard level, so the coordination is a deliberate setting rather than a default. Datadog links hover across a whole page by default, which makes correlation the path of least resistance and is the main reason its dashboards feel like one instrument. Honeycomb puts less weight on hover because the heatmap’s answer comes from selecting a region rather than reading a point, so the pointer’s job is drawing rather than inspecting. Netdata synchronises the crosshair across every chart on the page, which at per-second resolution across dozens of charts is what makes the density usable rather than overwhelming.
Related
Time series often uses point details. Detail on demand expands a whole panel. Legend and series toggle identifies or isolates lines.
Mobile adaptation supplies touch interactions. Explain this metric provides definitions that may need more room than a tooltip.