Announcing Foxglove Data Platform Events
Esther Weon ·
We developed Foxglove Data Platform to help you manage large volumes of robotics data, and Foxglove Studio to help you visually explore that data. But while these two pillars of data management and visualization are critical components of robotics development, we have much bigger plans to help you organize and explore data.
In addition to storing and viewing data, we want to help you identify the most interesting minutes – or seconds! – of that data. We want to help you cut through the noise and analyze large amounts of data more efficiently.
To equip our users with this level of granular control, we built Foxglove events. With events, you can now add metadata-rich annotations to your robotics data recordings – via either Foxglove Studio or Data Platform.
Creating events
In Data Platform
After importing a data recording into Foxglove Data Platform, navigate to the recording’s device page in Foxglove console and click “Create event”.
Each event you create must have a timestamp, a duration, and any number of metadata keys and values. A duration of 0 would indicate an instantaneous event (e.g. “the robot stopped”), while a duration of anything greater than 0 would indicate a time range (e.g. “the robot is going up a hill”).
You can then go to your “Events” page and see your newly created event.
In Studio
Navigate to the Foxglove console’s “Recordings” page and select a data recording to “View in Studio”. The Foxglove Studio window that opens with your Data Platform data source will display a bookmark icon on the playback bar.
Seek to a point of interest in your data, then click that bookmark icon to add an event to your data at that point on the timeline.
These events created from the Studio interface will also persist to your Foxglove console account’s “Events” page.
Viewing events
In Data Platform
Head over to the “Events” page for a list of all created events.
In Studio
Open the Data source sidebar, and select the “Events” tab for a list of events associated with your current data source.
When streaming data from Foxglove Data Platform, Foxglove Studio’s playback bar will display events using blue bars. Hovering on a blue bar will display that event’s metadata in a tooltip:
If the Data source sidebar is open to your list of events, hovering on an event will also highlight the corresponding event metadata in that sidebar pane.
All this makes it much easier to analyze what happened during a particular event.
Searching events
In Data Platform
You can use the filter controls on the “Events” page to help you find events. You can filter by device name, time, or metadata keys and values:
The metadata search field uses a specific syntax to filter down your events:
weather:rain– Find events with a certain metadata key and corresponding valueweather:rain weather:fog– Finds events withweatherthat matches bothrainANDfogweather:rain,fog– Finds events withweatherthat matchesrainORfog“error”– Finds events with either a key or value tagged “error”
Read more in the docs here.
In Studio
Open the Data source sidebar and click on the “Events” tab to see all your events. The search input field at the top of the tab uses the same query syntax supported in Foxglove Data Platform.
Type a query to filter events by metadata keys and values and find events of interest.
The future of Foxglove events
Whether you’re annotating when your rover encountered an obstacle, when your self-driving car noticed a stop sign, or when your warehouse robot successfully completed a task, Foxglove events can help you find the needle in the haystack. Instead of each team member navigating hours of recordings to find an important event, your entire team can collaborate on annotating your data and immediately revisit the moments that matter.
Check out the Studio and Data Platform docs for more information on how to incorporate events into your existing workflows. To ask questions or share feedback on our Foxglove event roadmap, you can join our Slack community or contact us directly.
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