Excluding Periods of Data From a Dashboard
Last updated
Last updated
When creating dashboards, customers often wish to exclude periods of time that represent maintenance or similar events. The use case is often ThousandEyes customers who want to create embedded service-level agreement (SLA) dashboards for their customers.
ThousandEyes dashboards do not provide arbitrary exclusion of test data by time period. However, you can exclude test data from a dashboard by setting up an alert suppression window, and setting this up in advance as described in Alert Suppression Windows. This feature blocks alert rules from being triggered during the time specified in the alert suppression configuration. Any data collected during this time, on the applied tests, can be omitted on a widget-by-widget basis from Cloud & Enterprise Agents and routing data sources. The image below shows the location of the setting, boxed in orange.
For more information about dashboards and alert rules, see Dashboards and Alerts.
The following figure shows an HTTP Server test results view with a configured Alert Suppression window (2):
During the time period shown above, two outage events happened - the first one was covered by a suppression window (1) while the second one (2) occurred when no suppression window was active.
The figure below shows how this data is reflected in a dashboard once Exclude Alert Suppression Window data has been enabled.
The first outage event (1) is shown as empty space in the graph. Results similar to those found in the second event (2) would otherwise fill this space. We can also see an indicator (3) informing us that this widget's results omit some data.
An All Alerts widget is also present to the right. This widget shows no gaps in data. As no alert that corresponded to the first event was triggered, there are zero alerts recorded for this period.
Suppressed data is effectively missing data. This means that HTTP server availability, shown in the Number widget, excludes some data from the calculation as well.
The alert suppression feature cannot be used for data exclusion retroactively. The alert-based reporting works on created alerts and their duration, meaning that alert suppression windows need to exist beforehand to prevent the alert rules from being triggered in the first place.
Data suppression will not be observed for alerts that begin prior to the alert suppression window. An alert suppression window needs to cover the entire period matching an alert condition.
The widget configuration includes a checkbox Exclude Data from Cloud Agents with local problems.
