Event markers for Insights

Hi folks!

We are truly overjoyed to see all the excitement surrounding event marker support for Insights charts. While we knew it was important for our users, it’s extremely validating to see that the community values it so highly even relative to other features across our product suite.

In terms of priority for Insights, event markers are definitely on our near-term roadmap. There are a couple of other initiatives in front of it, but March Mayhem definitely lit a fire under our collective rears to start scoping the work and thinking seriously about how we might implement this.

Along those lines, I have an ask from all of you: help us to understand your needs better by answering some or all of these questions.

1. When you think about event markers on charts in Insights, are you thinking about things like deployment markers and alerts, or do you also include change events from Infrastructure in that list? Or is it all important?

2. If you had a NRQL chart showing activity for multiple apps – each of which has its own events – would you want to show markers for all of those apps on the chart, or would you want the option to show them on an app by app basis?

3. What kind of information do you want to get out of the event marker? What would you do next after you got that info?

4. Do you want bulk controls on event markers for dashboards – in other words, an option to “show all markers” across all the widgets on a dashboard – in addition to per-widget controls?

Please feel free to provide any other feedback that you think might be relevant to our understanding of the community need. Thanks in advance for your engagement and participation! We learn a ton from this forum and its members, and it has a real impact on how we think about building the right stuff.

Cheers,
Henry

For myself, the option of when to display the markers and which markers to display would be useful. I would be happy with a list of event markers which could be selected for a dashboard with the widgets showing the markers.

Unless you wish to get really funky and add NRQL language such as this:

SELECT average(duration) FROM PageView SINCE last month TIMESERIES SHOW [Deployments/Alerts/Infrastructure Changes]

When the event marker is shown, I would expect the same functionality as is currently displayed in say APM or Browser where the lines are shown on the chart and hovering over the line provides the event information.

Hey @stefan_garnham – that is super interesting. @NateHeinrich and I have discussed the idea of making these kinds of events queryable via NRQL. It’s pretty likely that we’ll make the initial cut of this a bit more blunt – like an option on charts / dashboards to “show event markers” that would allow you to overlay events visually. However, the future could hold very different things…

Hi folks!

Just an update on this – and thanks for your feedback thus far!

We are currently working on a handful of features (creating dashboards across accounts, building an API for users to programmatically instantiate dashboards, as well as a new visualization for adding hyperlinks, text, and images to dashboards) that are ahead of this. Following the delivery of those things, it is very likely that we will start working on adding event markers support as well as integrating Insights more fully with our Alerting platform. As we get closer, I will be sure to ping this group.

Thanks,
Henry

Thanks for the update @hshapiro. Can’t wait to play with the new features

Do you have an update on this feature?

I wanted to respond with a quick update on the status of event markers, because I know they are a topic.

We were hoping to deliver event markers as part of our current project. But as we spent time digging into a solution, there were some challenges that we weren’t initially apparent. So that this point, we still need to do some work to identify possible solutions for event markers.

We see event markers in APM, why is it so hard to show them in Insights?

There are two types of data you can see in Insights: Aggregate metrics and analytical events. The deployment markers you see today in APM are rendered on metric charts. This is because a deployment event is easily mapped to a service or application.

With event-driven charts, there is not a consistent link between a deployment (scoped to a service being deployed) and the vast array of analytical events (scoped to many different things). The challenge really is around these types of event-based charts. We need to do additional work to create that consistent and accurate linkage where it applies. It is clear to us where we can provide the accurate data you need. The challenge is in making sure we prevent injecting confusing, out-of-context, or inaccurate markers.

As an agile team, and realizing the specific challenge with event markers on event-driven charts, we are going to ship the most easily achieved improvements first. Then we will follow-on with solution that completes getting event markers on all charts.

We’d be interested to know when NR plan to resolve the issue of deployments not being visible in charts on insights. thanks.