Sparse traces visualisation

[greenpart]

Requirement - what kind of business use case are you trying to solve?

Sparse traces containing span groups interleaved with long spanless gaps are visualised inefficiently. One of the observed scenarios leading to such traces is a consumer which consumes after a significant delay.

This is a trivial example. Real cases includes hours of delays for consumer to follow the span.

Problem - what in Jaeger blocks you from solving the requirement?

Timeline is strictly linear.

Proposal - what do you suggest to solve the problem or improve the existing situation?

One possible solution would be to shrink empty space and place an expandable placeholder.

Review UX at github can be used as an UX idea reference.

One blue line can hide any number of lines under the hood and give a context of hidden matters at the same time.

Here is a low level mockup

Possible criteria to apply shrinking:

• gap between span groups is longer than sum of their duration (2x, 3x, Nx time bigger).
• placeholder is more compact than gap before shrinking.

Any open questions to address

Is it possible to implement this kind of UX optimisation keeping the visualisation performance for timeline preview and detailed view?

[yurishkuro]

Hm, I thought we already had an issue for this. Thanks for booking it.

I agree, the idea is to collapse empty spaces. It may not even need to be expandable, just display a page tear (whichever is easier to implement).

We don't have a lot of volunteers working on the UI, so I'll tag it up for grabs.