This directory contains a list of json files used as raw page event data for the d3 visualizations. They are pre-processed by the Sinatra app and transformed into data for specific to the visualization.
Datasets are encoded as json data. There are two formats with built in support:
- Old format: arbitrary format where each json record had exactly 5 columns
- New (v2) format: more flexibility for specifying multiple dimensions
The datasets consist of page events that correspond to a single web request. The request has a timestamp in milliseconds unixtime. In the new format this represents when it started. In the old format it's interpreted as where the event ended and is adjusted accordingly.
It has one or two duration values representing front end or back end. For New Relic data these values are the latencies measured by RUM from the browser (frontend) and those measured by the appserver agent (backend).
Events do not have to be in order.
An event has one or more dimensions. The most obvious one is the URL or resource
path, normalized to exclude parameters. We refer to this as the transaction
generally, not URL. Other dimensions include things like the browser, region,
or account.
The data consists of an array of arrays. The first element of the array is interpreted as a header, which maps the column names to the column indices. See testdata_v2.json for an example.
The header must include timestamp whose column is a timestamp in
milliseconds, identifying when the transaction started.
It must also include one of backend, frontend or both.
Other columns are interpreted as dimensions of the transaction, such
as browser, url, account, etc.
You can use whatever format you want--CSV, XML, weblog--you just need to add or replace a read_data helper in the app.rb to read your format, or pull in the live data.
You should use the new format for a better user experience and more flexibility with future plugins. The old format is available for backward compatibility. It is based on the data I had access to at the time I was working on this.
Each record looks like this:
[1368817684170,"","URL/Home/index.html",500, 50],
The column values are listed in order: 1. Timestamp in milliseconds 2. Date field, ignored 3. Web transaction name; i.e, URL path or controller action 4. Front end latency, as measured from the browser 5. Back end (app server) latency as measured on the server.
You may not have values for both (4) and (5) populate 5 to start with and leave a zero in 4.