Welcome to Managed Service for TimescaleDB (MST)! MST is a Database as a Service (DBaaS) offering that provides an easy way for you to analyze time-series. Powered by TimescaleDB, you can create database instances in the cloud and automate many of your most common operational tasks. This allows you to spend more time focusing on your time-series workloads and less time worrying about database management.
Before we start - a couple core concepts and phrases
For reference, a few of the core concepts you will encounter when you are using MST:
Account: Your MST account. You can register for a MST account on the Sign Up page.
Project: An empty project is created for you automatically when you sign-up and are the highest organization level. Projects organize groups of services, and have different billing settings. A way to organize Services in your account and provide access to Services with other users. This is the highest level of access.
Service: Multiple services can be created under each project, and each service corresponds to a cloud service provider tier (e.g. AWS Timescale-Pro-512-IO-Optimized).
Database: Databases are created within the context of a single server, and can be viewed and created after selecting one of your services, and then selecting the databases tab.
Service Plans: A Service Plan defines the configuration and level of database management that will be performed for a given TimescaleDB deployed.
Step 1 - Sign up for Managed Service for TimescaleDB
Verify your account by clicking on the link in the email you will receive.
Step 2 - Create your first service
Login to MST using your credentials.
Click on the "create a new service" button:

Select TimescaleDB, Choose your cloud provider, region, and service plan. (Note: you’ll have $300 of free credits to get started exploring)

Wait a few minutes while the new database is being created.

Step 3 - Install psql (or another preferred SQL client like pgAdmin)
If you don’t already have psql installed, here are the instructions.
Step 4 - Connect to your new database via psql
Click on your new service. In the “Overview” tab, you’ll see the Service URI. Click on the “Copy” link to copy it to your clipboard:

Switch over to a terminal window and paste your connection string after the psql command:
$ psql postgres://tsdbadmin:{YOUR_PASSWORD_HERE}@{|YOUR_HOSTNAME_HERE}:{YOUR_PORT_HERE}/defaultdb?sslmode=require
psql (11.3, server 11.4)
SSL connection (protocol: TLSv1.2, cipher: ECDHE-RSA-AES256-GCM-SHA384, bits: 256, compression: off)
Type "help" for help.
defaultdb=>
Step 5 - Verify that TimescaleDB is installed
Run the \dx
command to view all installed extensions:
defaultdb=> \dx
List of installed extensions
Name | Version | Schema | Description
-------------+---------+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------
plpgsql | 1.0 | pg_catalog | PL/pgSQL procedural language
timescaledb | 1.3.2 | public | Enables scalable inserts and complex queries for time-series data
(2 rows)
defaultdb=>
Conclusion
Well done! Now you are up and running on MST.
While we're working on having a few example data sets pre-loaded in your database, check out this link to explore examples with time-series weather data, DevOps data, and more.