Release Notes September 1, 2023

New Navigation Bar

The left Navigation Bar has a new look and organization of topics.

Figure 1 - New Navigation Bar

The new Navigation Bar has the following topics:

• Home - links to the customizable Home page with links to your most frequently used content.

• Quick find - quickly locate data or information on Observe.

• Favorites - locate your content marked Favorite.

• Investigate - use these links to Explorers where you can analyze and model your data.

  • Logs - use the Log Explorer to analyze Logs datasets.

  • Metrics - use the Metrics Explorer to locate metrics of interest for Datasets.

  • Traces(TBA) - review your OpenTelemetry traces and search for traces of interest.

• Explore - locate specific topics such as the following:

  • Dashboards - links to configured Dashboards on Observe.

  • Monitors - links to configured Monitors on Observe.

  • Datasets - links to Datasets for applications and other ingested data.

  • Worksheets - links to existing Worksheets where you can model Datasets.

  • Dataset Graph - links to an overview of connections between your Datasets.

• Data - locate Datastreams and Applications.

  • Datastreams - review sources of ingested data.

  • Applications - review installed and available Apps such as Microsoft Azure and OpenTelemetry.

  • + Application - links to the Apps page where you can select and install Apps.

• Help - links to helpful information and O11y, the Observe GPT bot.

  • Docs & support - links to the Observe User Guide that contains helpful information about configuring parameters as well as tutorials to guide you through configuring and modeling Datasets.

  • O11y GPT - get answers to all of your questions about configuring, modeling, and shaping data, as well as using OPAL.

Accessing Workspace Settings

The bottom of the Navigation Bar displays your Username and the Observe instance name. Click on the Settings icon to display more options:

Figure 2 - Accessing Workplace Settings

Clicking Workspace Settings takes you to the Settings interface where you can perform the following tasks:

• Members - add, remove, or edit Members.

• Datastreams - view a list of configured ingest pipelines from Apps or other sources.

• Apps - view a list of configured Apps or add a new App to your instance.

• Usage Dashboard - view usage of Observe credits on your instance.

• Account Settings - edit your Account settings.

You can also perform the following tasks from this menu:

• Switch workspaces - if you have more than one Workspace configured, switch between them.

• Workspace theme - change the color scheme of your Observe interface.

• Account Settings - edit your Account settings.

Threshold Log Monitor

Use Threshold Log Monitor to build Monitors and Alerts for Log Events in your Logs datasets. This can be useful for monitoring events such as Unauthorized in Container Logs or specific events in other types of Logs Datasets.

To access Threshold Log Monitor, click Monitors and then Create New.

Figure 1 - Threshold Log Monitor

After you click Create New, select a Logs Dataset such as Events in a Kubernetes container, and then begin configuring your Threshold Log Monitor:

Figure 2 - Configuring a Threshold Log Monitor

For more information on Threshold Log Monitors, see placeholder.

Log Explorer - Live Mode

View events as they occur using the Live Mode with Logs Datasets and Log Explorer.

Figure 5 - Enabling Live Mode

Since Live Mode increases your credit usage, you may want to disable it unless you’re actively working on troubleshooting an ongoing issue. Live Mode automatically becomes disabled after 15 minutes.

For Log Explorer, you can select from 5 minutes, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes.

OPAL Language Updates

topk_aggr

Description

Returns an approximation of the top K most frequent values in the input, along with their approximate frequencies.

The output contains an array of arrays. In the inner arrays, the first entry is the value in the input, while the second entry is its frequency. The outer array contains k elements, sorted by frequencies in descending order.

Return type

array

Domain

This is an aggregate function (aggregates rows over a group in aggregate verbs.

This is a window function (calculates over a group of multiple input rows using windowing.)

Categories

• Aggregate

• Semistructured

• Window

Usage

topk_agg( expr, k )

Argument	Type	Required	Multiple
expr	any	Required	Only one
k	int64	Required	Only one

Examples

statsby top_names:topk_agg(name, 2), group_by(class)

Given the following input:

name	class
Jack	A
Joe	A
Alice	A
Alice	A
Tom	B
Joe	B
Kathy	B
Mike	A
Tom	B

It returns the following output:

class	top_names
A	[[“Alice”, 2], [“Jack”, 1]]
B	[[“Tom”, 2], [“Kathy”, 1]]

Note that if there is a tie in the last position the result can be non-deterministic. Any of the values with the same frequency may be included in the last position.