Optimize Event and Notification Lists

[flourish86]

** Work in Progress **

Context of Use

Users

• experienced Icinga (Web) users
• unexperienced Icinga (Web) users, that use Icinga Web only for gathering quick information

Use Cases

• Quickly identify problem sources after an outage
• Users need to quickly recognize, when events occurred and if users have been notified
• they need an overview in context of other events (list)

Problems with current solution

• Relative Time Stamps make it hard to identify, when older events occurred in context of other events
• relative time stamps are helpful, tough, for more recent events
• the dense information makes it hard to extract critical information

Preferred Solutions

Event List

Group Event by day

Add a separator per day to the list

• A the visual break helps to get a better overview of, on which day the events occurred and avoids redundant information.
• As the timestamps are on the right hand side of the list item, aligning the date to the right makes it easy to scan by time, while focussing on scanning for visuals on the left side

Display absolute timestamps

Use absolute timestamps by default

• While using absolute timestamps should be used by default since they allow for more precise contextual analysis, relative timestamps can be more helpful for analyzing only recent events (especially when the view is used as a dashlet)
• Add an option for relative timestamps
  
• Toggle relative timestamps: the fancy version 🪄

Notes

1. This should not be implemented on its own without a proper hint, since the functionality is pretty undiscoverable for most users.
2. It should also not solely be done in the frontend, since users need relative timestamps to work with urls to be used in dashboards
   

Add notification information

The suggestions are probably technically not feasible, so here are some variants.

Variant 1: Expand with notification preview

Variant 2: Display notification count

Display icon, if any notifications for this event have been sent.

Declutter the event list

Generic Event List Item

State Changes

Soft States

We could opt to not display soft state changes in global history, but this has to be clearly communicated.

Here are some suggestions

Flapping

Downtimes

Acknowledgement

Comment

Notification Event

[flourish86]

ref/IP/52023