Understand what changed in your environment
When on-call engineers respond to an issue, they need to understand what changed, where the change occurred, and when the change happened. These insights are critical to investigating and remediating issues when they arise.
Changes Explorer displays change events to create a comprehensive view of all changes in your environment. Each change event describes a change within your environment or Chronosphere Observability Platform tenant at a specific time so you can answer questions like "When did a particular service deploy last?" or "Which alerts triggered in the last week?"
Change events provide an additional layer of meaning. A specific set of changes might occur at the system level, but can be further differentiated by category, type, and source. For example, a system-level change can be categorized as a deploy, alert, or infrastructure event. Within a specific category, you can differentiate events. For example, within the infrastructure category, you can add a type such as network change, storage modification, or security update to distinguish these events.
Get started with change events
On-call engineers can filter change events to understand what changes occurred prior to the onset of an issue. These users can enable change events to display them as lined annotations on dashboard panels. This ability to identify and isolate change events can help remediate issues faster and minimize downstream impacts.
Change events can also display in the Query Results for individual monitors. When on-call engineers click links in Observability Platform notifications, they're directed to the Monitors page for the related alert. On-call engineers can display change events for a monitor using predefined filter configurations, or define queries using advanced filtering to display the events they want to visualize. This capability helps to determine issues before the alert triggered, such as code deploy and audit log events.
On-call engineers can also create change events from Observability Platform or with the Chronosphere API. This feature allows on-call engineers to create relevant change events, such as a broadcast to inform other users of upcoming maintenance, or create third-party change events in addition to the predefined change event categories.
You can also send your existing change events to Observability Platform from third-party applications, such as Buildkite, GitHub, and LaunchDarkly.
To access this tool, in the navigation menu select Explorers > Changes Explorer.