Computer Event Timeline Widget

Owned by Martin Moghadam
Last updated: Dec 09, 2019 by Joachim Hansen
3 min read

The Computer Event Timeline widget makes it easy to determine if a selected computer has had performance problems. If it has, the widget makes it easy to see exactly which problems the computer has had, and exactly when they happened—just look at the timeline.

Example: If you work in a Service Desk role, and a caller claims that his computer was "very slow this morning," you can use the widget to quickly verify if the caller's computer has had problems during the morning hours. If it has, you can quickly see what the problems were.

The widget looks at events that have happened on the selected computer, and displays them as bubble markers on a timeline. Remember what an event is? It's a threshold violation, for example a response time that isn't acceptable.

Bubbles are color-coded based on the density of events. The more events that are crowded together within a 15-minute period, the more red the timeline's bubbles become. This is based on the fact that the number of events doesn't always in itself describe the user experience very well, but if many events happen right after each other, the user is likely to become very annoyed.

  • White bubble: up to 15% event density
  • Light orange bubble: 15-35% event density
  • Orange bubble: 35-70% event density
  •  Fully red bubble: more than 70% event density


Help writer's tip: I have a fairly pale complexion, but if my computer is really slow, I can get so annoyed that my face becomes intensely red. You can use that as a rule of thumb, when you use the timeline to judge how a user is affected by poor performance.

Technically, the density percentage is calculated in a 15-minute sliding window with 1-minute intervals, as the ratio between intervals with events and the length of the window.
You can view more details on the timeline this way:

  • Number of events: Place your cursor over a bubble to view the number of events that the bubble represents.
  • Details about events: Click a bubble to view when each event happened, and how great the threshold violation was.
  • Zoom: To zoom in, click and drag across the required area of the timeline.
For a more analytical approach, try to select a long time period on the dashboard. When you do that, the timeline can sometimes reveal otherwise hidden patterns, such as times of the day, week or month when the computer performs poorly.

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