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5. Investigate Activity

Investigate Team Activity

Ent Beta

To help you understand how your team members are using Honeycomb, we provide access to activity logs. Activity logs allow you to see who or what caused a change in specific resource configurations. Activity logs support these resources:

• User logins (authentication and IP changes)
• Custom fields, otherwise known as Derived Columns (create, update, delete)
• Service Level Objectives (SLOs) (create, update, delete, and resets)
  • Service Level Indicator (SLI) expression updates
• Triggers (create, update, delete, and state changes to/from Triggered)
• Query results (create)
• API keys (create, update, disable)
• Burn alerts (create, update, delete, and state changes to/from Triggered)

Teams can access an Activity Log Environment that contains various datasets housing streams of activity related to each supported resource. Within this Environment, team members can observe and investigate team activity with all of Honeycomb’s features, including querying, visualizations, Boards, Triggers, and more.

Report on All Team Activity 

You can interact with activity logs through reports.

Access Activity Log Reports 

To access Activity Log reports:

1. Log in to the Honeycomb UI.

2. From the navigation bar, select Account, then select Team settings.

3. Select the Activity Log view.

Export Activity Log Reports 

You can download all available activity for your Team into a comma-separated values (CSV) file. For each entry, the downloaded file includes:

• Who performed the action
• What time the action was performed
• What kind of action was performed
• Whether or not the action succeeded or failed

To download your Activity Log reports:

1. Log in to the Honeycomb UI.

2. From the navigation bar, select Account, then select Team settings.

3. Select the Activity Log view.

4. Select Download CSV.

File Schema 

The downloaded Activity Log CSV file uses the following schema and definitions. Not all attributes are relevant; only some may apply to each entry.

• timestamp: Timestamp when the action was recorded by the system.
• resource.type: Type of resource the log relates to.
• resource.action: Create, Update, or Delete. In the case of certain resources, can be a system event.
• resource.id: Unique identifier associated with the resource being modified, if applicable.
• environment.slug: Slug (unique name) of the specific Honeycomb Environment associated with the entry, if applicable.
• dataset.slug: Slug (unique name) of the specific Honeycomb Dataset associated with the entry, if applicable.
• changed_fields: For Create, Update, or Delete logs, attributes of the resource that changed.
• user.id: User’s ID if the log is the result of a user action. System if the log is the result of an automated action.
• user.email: User’s email address if a log is the result of a user action.
• user.ip_address: IP address that generated the log (only available on User Login entries).
• metadata: Other information about the event or change, if available.

Investigate Team Activity Using Activity Log Datasets 

Teams also have an Activity Log Environment that contains various datasets housing streams of activity related to each supported resource. Within this Environment, team members can observe and investigate team activity with all of Honeycomb’s features, including querying, visualizations, Boards, Triggers, and more.

Access Activity Log Datasets 

To access your Activity Log Environment:

1. Log in to the Honeycomb UI.

2. Select the Environments label on the top-left, then select Activity Log.

3. Begin querying the environment and its datasets. Available datasets include API Keys, Derived Columns, Query Results, Triggers, SLOs, and Users.

Explore Your Activity Log Environment 

Using Honeycomb to monitor your team activity opens up a wide range of possibilities to explore. We want to know the ways in which your team discovers and uses Activity Log data, but to help you get started exploring, check out the following ideas.

Find Environment-wide Data 

To find the types of data available in your Activity Log Environment, run a query for All datasets in activity log with:

VISUALIZE	GROUP BY
COUNT	resource.type

Explore Available Fields on Specific Datasets 

To learn about the fields available within a dataset:

1. Run an empty query on the target Dataset.
2. In Query Builder, use the Events view to view the contents of each event. In this display, each event is a row and each field is a column.
3. Use this information to construct and try different queries.

Find Sensitive Triggers 

Find sensitive triggers, or triggers that seem to fire more than expected or tend to auto-resolve. Once you find these triggers, consider improving their configuration to give more actionable alerts. Use the Triggers dataset to identify how many times a trigger has fired in a given time period.

To see which triggers fire often, run a query with:

VISUALIZE	WHERE	GROUP BY
COUNT	resource.action = triggered	name

Find Derived Column Experts 

Using Derived Columns indicates advanced Honeycomb knowledge. Find your advanced Honeycomb users. Query the Derived Column dataset for Create and Update actions to find out who develops Derived Columns and uses them to explore data.

Find All Queries Run During Incidents 

The Query Results dataset shows how many queries users run and their query patterns. To learn which datasets users interact with most, run a query with:

VISUALIZE	GROUP BY
COUNT	environment.slug dataset.slug

To see what types of queries, or questions, that users ask during an incident, use the above query and select the time duration that maps to an incident window.

Find All Queries Run Using Specific Fields 

Ready to retire some data? Or are you curious about which parts of the datasets are used most?

Query the Query Results dataset to see which columns are most queried or if specific columns are queried. To see patterns of fields being used in queries, run a query with:

VISUALIZE	GROUP BY
COUNT	query.where

Alternatively, use a different field for GROUP BY with this query, such as GROUP BY query.group_by or GROUP BY query.havings.

Example: Explore the Triggers Dataset 

To learn more about the data contained in the Activity Log Dataset and understand the questions that you can ask, start by exploring the Triggers dataset. An event for a Trigger generates each time that a team member creates, updates, or deletes a Trigger, as well as when the Trigger is triggered or resolved.

Every Trigger event contains attributes that contain:

• the dataset slug and ID
• the environment slug and ID
• the query ID associated with the Trigger
• the name and description of the Trigger
• who or what generated the event, such as user ID, or for triggered/resolved Triggers, system

Events created when a user updated a Trigger will also contain values that indicate what changed about the Trigger.

Export Activity Log data for a Specific Resource 

Each Dataset within your Activity Log Environment contains a stream of activity related to one resource. To investigate activity for a specific resource, you can export Activity Log data for the dataset that corresponds to the target resource.

To download your Activity Logs for a particular dataset:

1. Log in to the Honeycomb UI.

2. In the left navigation menu, select Manage Data.

3. In the list, locate and select Datasets.

4. Select the Activity Log view.

5. Select Download CSV.

To learn more about the information you can report on and the file schema, visit File Schema.