Adding OR logic forced us to confront why users preferred raw SQL
4 days ago
- #user-experience
- #observability
- #query-builder
- In 2022, the company had three different query interfaces for logs, traces, and metrics, each with its own syntax and limitations.
- The v3 query builder, built in 2022, unified these interfaces but lacked support for complex boolean logic, especially for logs.
- Senior engineers struggled to discover features in v3/v4, leading to a new design principle for v5: 'Stop making decisions for users.'
- The v5 query builder required a complete architectural overhaul, affecting explorers, dashboards, alerts, and the underlying query API.
- Key features of v5 include full-text search like Google, complex boolean logic with precedence, and cross-source query portability.
- Performance improvements in v5 include instant suggestions, smart caching, and progressive loading for autocomplete.
- UX debt was addressed by making chronological ordering, time aggregation controls, and interval selection more discoverable.
- Users began replacing ClickHouse queries with Query Builder queries due to its ease of use, autocomplete, and validation.
- Future enhancements include subqueries for cross-signal correlation and cross-source joins for unified debugging.
- The lesson learned: technical elegance is worthless if users can't discover and use the features.