Format the "Start Time" column in Tempo Search Panel

[connorlindsey]

Discussed in https://github.com/grafana/grafana/discussions/40667

^{Originally posted by annanay25 October 20, 2021}
At the moment, the start time panel is really hard to read and make sense of, I usually just gloss over it. It would be interesting to display the time-diff between now and the trace start time, which would read like 1m ago / 30s ago, and is easier for human consumption. However, this might make sense upto the 1h mark beyond which we might want to use the real timestamp, but I think the Grafana team will know how to handle this better!

[tharun208]

@connorlindsey I like to work on this

[m1hanick]

@connorlindsey
Is there a way to disable this formatting?
We'd like to draw a time series graph of our traces, just like the Jaeger GUI does.
But without timestamp values, we cannot

[connorlindsey]

Hey @m1hanick, going to cc our tracing team on this @joey-grafana

[m1hanick]

Here is an example of what we'd like to achieve (now we're using Jaeger datasource, but seeking a way to migrate to Tempo)

[joey-grafana]

Thanks for reaching out. So you're right about the time series needing a time field. At the moment the closest we have to a time field is probably the start time field. This is the case for both Jaeger & Tempo.

We can probably take a similar approach with Tempo that we did with Jaeger. Not sure how disabling the formatting would solve this. Can you open a separate issue - which we can add to the backlog.

[m1hanick]

@joey-grafana
honestly speaking, we were trying to play with Tempo time-series graph in the desire to overcome the issue of wrong datalinks: #54768
I managed to disable this "Start time formatting", and finally I got the graph
But it has the same problem with datalinks getting values from opposite data-points