What is an activity feed?

Tools in your software development toolchain contain essential component information, such as deployment information from source code repositories or incident details from incident reporting tools. This information is vital for you to own, develop, and maintain these components efficiently. You often need to check multiple locations to get complete information about your components and require specialization to gather information from these tools.

The activity feed in Compass provides a platform to display events from any tool and provides a way to rapidly assess what has happened to your component during a window of interest. For example, the activity feed can show deployment events from a component’s connected Bitbucket repository to help you assess the recency of the production build and see the frequency of deployment activity right from within Compass.

A component’s activity feed can also show you the events from your component's upstream dependencies, which are the components your component depends on, enabling you to assess the impact of events on your software infrastructure.

Activity feed views

The activity feed has two visual presentations – the timeline view and a list view.

The timeline view is a visual and interactive view with events plotted on a timeline. The timeline ranges from the current day up to six months in the past, and shows the relative time distances between the events. You can navigate to a specific date and time on the timeline to see the events that occurred for your component. The timeline also shows events from upstream dependencies allowing you to correlate between dependent components. Hovering on an event marker shows you the event’s details. Clicking on an event marker takes you to the event’s source, for example, clicking on a deployment event marker takes you to the component’s deployment pipeline.

Here’s how the timeline view appears in Compass:

The list view is tabular view with events listed in reverse chronological order with the most recent event appearing at the top of the list. This view provides a highly scannable list of events and event details in a single view. You can also toggle between showing and hiding event information from the component’s upstream dependencies in context with your current component. Clicking on an event takes you to the event’s source, for example, clicking on a deployment event takes you to the component’s deployment pipeline.

Here’s how the list view appears in Compass: