It’s been a while since the last time I posted about an inGraphs feature, but I recently discovered a nifty bit of (new?) hotness that I thought I’d share. Suppose you’re looking at an inGraph:
You happen to think it’s pretty interesting and you’d like to share it, so you click the button in the upper righthand corner to generate a snapshot:
At this point inGraphs presents you with a dialog that looks like this:
You pick a name, click “Submit”, and you get something like this:
Link: https://ingraphs.prod.linkedin.com/snapshot/my-awesome-snapshot_20191206_154120/
…but wait. Back up a tick. What’s this “Use absolute time” checkbox? Where did that come from? That wasn’t there before!
The “normal” behavior of inGraphs snapshots - the behavior if you do not check the “Use absolute time” box - is to construct the “Created via” link more or less exactly how it looked at the time the snapshot is created. That might look something like this:
https://ingraphs.prod.linkedin.com/dashboard/stickyrouting/graph/main%20partition%20requests%20distribution%20per%20fabric? fabric_groups=prod&width=735
The behavior when you check the box is to generate the “Created via” link as well as injecting time selector parameters for the time at which the snaposhot was taken:
https://ingraphs.prod.linkedin.com/dashboard/stickyrouting/graph/main%20partition%20requests%20distribution%20per%20fabric? fabric_groups=prod&width=735&use_time_selector=&start_time=1575618083017&end_time=1575646883017
The former might be what you want some of the time, but I suspect that the latter is much more commonly-desired behavior. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve clicked on a snapshot link in a GCN, clicked through “Created via” so I can explore the metric a bit for myself, realized that the graph I was looking at was for the present time (as opposed to the time when the GCN was actually popping off), and then had to spend 5-10 minutes futzing around adjusting the time range on the damn thing to see what it looked like when the GCN was actually happening.
The thing I might love most about this is precisely its subtlety. It’s not flashy - it’s one small checkbox that wasn’t there previously. It’s not novel - this behavior can also be achieved by the snapshot creator configuring the graph to use time selectors in the first place. …but this one tiny incremental improvement - just a little checkbox placed at the point of need at snapshot creation time - is the kind of user-focused detail that results in genuine delight.