Problem
The line peaked somewhere around 14:20 at something like 400. The viewer needs the actual timestamp and the actual number, and does not want to leave the chart, open a table, or change the range to find it.
Solution
Follow the cursor and report what is under it. Shneiderman’s phrase for the task is details-on-demand, and the demand here is the lowest-cost one available: move the mouse.
The design decisions are all about how much to say and how many panels to say it in.
How much. A tooltip showing one series is precise and unhelpful when the question is “what were the others doing”. Showing all series at that timestamp answers the comparison but becomes a wall of text on a chart with twelve lines, so implementations end up needing all three modes: single, all, and none. Sorting the all-series list by value rather than by series name is a small change that makes it readable.
How many panels. A shared crosshair draws the same time position across every chart on the page, which converts a page of separate charts into one coordinated instrument, and is the single highest-value feature in this pattern. Once it exists, “did memory spike at the same moment” stops requiring measurement against the screen edge.
The thing that separates a good tooltip from a bad one is restraint about what it adds. A tooltip is the right place for the exact value, the exact timestamp, the units, and the series identity. It is the wrong place for a paragraph, a second chart, or an action, because it appears and disappears based on where the mouse happens to be.
Use when
The chart’s job is shape but the viewer occasionally needs precision, which describes nearly every time series on a dashboard someone investigates with.
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 is invisible until used, so features that only exist there are undiscoverable, and viewers who don’t know to hover conclude the chart can’t tell them. It’s unavailable on touch devices, which means the mobile version of the dashboard silently loses a capability rather than replacing it. Tooltips occlude the very data they describe, and the bigger they get the more they cover. And a tooltip that follows the cursor closely enough to feel responsive will flicker at panel edges unless someone has thought about collision.
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 is the chart this most often sits on. Detail on demand is the same idea at panel scale rather than point scale. Legend and series toggle is the other way to answer “which line is which”. Mobile adaptation is where this pattern needs a replacement rather than a fallback. Explain this metric is what a tooltip should not try to become.