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Metrics only show the latest value

Simon Falsig

I'm investigating Compass Metrics, and am wondering if there's a way to display historical values also?

I've created a custom metric for testing, which I'm sending some fake testing data to through curl.

Right now, the latest value is displayed on the component page (which is fine). Clicking the metric itself brings up the details box, which shows a graph labelled "Most recent values" - but it still only shows the single latest value.

Based on the label ("values" rather than "value") and the fact that there's a graph, it seems to me that the intention is that it displays multiple values?

Is there any way to get this working? Thanks in advance!

Accepted answers

Emile Raffoul

Hi @Simon Falsig,

Thanks for reaching out and evaluating Compass Metrics!

Compass Metrics do support historical values but there is a limit of one value per hour. If multiple values are sent within the same clock hour then only the latest will be displayed until the clock ticks over to the next hour. Could this be what you experienced during testing?

To give an example:

1. Send metric value "10" at 1:50pm and the value displayed will be "10".

2. Send metric value "11" at 1:59pm and you'll see it's updated to show the latest i.e. "11". You won't see "10" in the history anymore.

3. Now the clock ticks over 2:00pm and you send a new value "12". You will now see both the "11" and the "12" in the "Most recent values" section.

All comments

Emile Raffoul

Hi @Simon Falsig,

Thanks for reaching out and evaluating Compass Metrics!

To give an example:

1. Send metric value "10" at 1:50pm and the value displayed will be "10".

2. Send metric value "11" at 1:59pm and you'll see it's updated to show the latest i.e. "11". You won't see "10" in the history anymore.

3. Now the clock ticks over 2:00pm and you send a new value "12". You will now see both the "11" and the "12" in the "Most recent values" section.

Simon Falsig

Thanks @Emile Raffoul! Yep, apparently I just needed a bit more patience Sending another metric a few hours later does indeed cause multiple values to display.

From https://developer.atlassian.com/cloud/compass/components/push-metric-values-using-a-curl-command/#step-4--run-the-curl-command:
"Out of all metric values sent within one hour, only the latest value sent persists in Compass." - do you know if this is a running timer? As in, if I keep sending data every 30 minutes, it will always just display the latest?

Also, is there any documentation on how many historical values are stored/shown?

Emile Raffoul

Hi @Simon Falsig

I'm glad that helped!

do you know if this is a running timer? As in, if I keep sending data every 30 minutes, it will always just display the latest?

It retains one value for every hour block in the timestamp so it's not a running timer in the traditional sense. If you send a value every 30 mins, you'll see a history but some values will get dropped. For example, if you send at 14:20, 14:50, 15:20, 15:50, then you'll see the values for 14:50 and 15:50 and the other two will be dropped.

is there any documentation on how many historical values are stored/shown?

The UI currently shows a maximum of 10 but there isn't a restriction on the total number of historical values stored for a metric (besides the hourly limit described above). Do you have a preference for the number of values displayed in the UI? Alternatively the API is paginated so it's another option if hitting the API directly works for your use case.

I can't quite find this info in the documentation so we'll look to get that updated. Thanks for letting us know!

Simon Falsig

Sounds good, thanks again, @Emile Raffoul!

The functionality as it is sounds usable. It'd be nice to have a bit more control of how much and how things are displayed though (how many values, graph/bars/etc.), but not super critical.

The particular usecase I'm looking at is to upload metrics for a specific release, so being able to label the uploaded values (i.e. with a release version string like "1.4.12"), and have that label displayed under the metric (instead of the timestamp that is currently shown) would be quite amazing though.