Visualize events

This article explains how to set up and filter queries on CDF events and annotate the events to graphs on your Grafana dashboard. You can customize the time range, the events to display, and the columns according to your needs.

In this article:

• Work with events in a table
  • Define a query
• Annotate graphs with events

Work with events in a table

Open the Event tab in Grafana to work with the events in a table.

Define a query

The events query uses the events/list endpoint to retrieve data.

Format: events{someFilter=number, otherFilter="string"}

Example:

events{externalIdPrefix='WORKORDER', assetSubtreeIds=[{id=12}, {externalId='ext_id'}]}

You can filter on these properties: externalIdPrefix, metadata, assetIds, assetExternalIds, rootAssetIds, assetSubtreeIds, dataSetIds, source, type, subtype.

By default, the query returns events that are active in the time range, but you can customize a query with the additional time filters startTime, endTime, activeAtTime, createdTime, lastUpdatedTime.

Here's an example of how to get all finished events that started in the current time range:

events{startTime={min=$__from}, endTime={isNull=false}}

Specify additional client-side filtering with the =~, !~ and != operators. A comma between multiple filters acts as a logical AND.

Format:

• =~, regex equality, returns results satisfying the regular expression.

• !~, regex inequality, excludes results satisfying the regular expression.

• !=, strict inequality, returns items where a property doesn't equal a given value.

Example:

events{type='WORKORDER', subtype=~'SUB.*'}

NOTE

Do not use the client-side filters as the primary filtering method. These filters are applied after items are returned from CDF, and you might not see all data if CDF returns the maximum number of items (1000).

You can create templates by using the $variable_name syntax.

Example:

events{type='WORKORDER', subtype=$variable}

Annotate graphs with events

Use annotations to overlay rich event information from CDF on graphs in Grafana.

This is how to set up CDF events as annotations to a graph in Grafana:

1. Navigate to your dashboard's settings, and select Annotations from the left side.

2. Select your CDF project in the Data Source field.

3. Specify the query to fetch and filter events from CDF. For example:

   events{type="some", subtype=~"sub.*"}
   

   The query above requests events with parameter type="some" and filters the results by subtype that matches sub.*.

   • For a complete list of valid parameters, see the API documentation.

   • Learn more about how to filter the results, for example, by using regular expressions.

4. Click Update.