Announcing Foxglove Events

We developed Foxglove to help you manage large volumes of robotics data, and Foxglove 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.

Creating Events

Click “Visualize” for a recording on the “Recordings” page. The data will open for playback in a new window – locate the bookmark icon on the playback bar. Seek to a point of interest in your data, then click the bookmark icon to add an Event at that point on the timeline.

You can then go to your “Events” page and see your newly created event.

Viewing Events

Head over to the “Events” page for a list of all created Events.

When streaming data from Foxglove, Foxglove’s playback bar will display Events using blue bars. Hovering on a blue bar will display that event’s metadata in a tooltip:

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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

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 value
• weather:rain weather:fog – Finds Events with weather that matches both rain AND fog
• weather:rain,fog – Finds Events with weather that matches rain OR fog
• “error” – Finds Events with either a key or value tagged “error”

Read more in the docs here.

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's 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 Foxglove 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 Discord community or contact us directly.