Building a better search experience

As someone deeply invested in the evolution of SquaredUp, I’d like to share more about our search capability and how we designed the functionality.

SquaredUp can connect to 100+ data sources, thousands of objects, tons of metrics, and and we offer many purpose-built out-of-the-box dashboards and monitors. We've deliberately designed our search experience to be able to handle the complexity of various data environments and make finding relevant information seamless and efficient.

Data at your fingertips

Our search function is so simple to use, and it makes it possible to surface your data in seconds.

Looking for a team’s SLO (e.g.engineering team's velocity metric) that’s been added on a dashboard? Search for “velocity”to find the dashboard or tile that contains the metric.

Heard from a colleague that something has gone wrong (e.g.the build pipeline is failing) but not sure where to start? Search for the pipeline name in SquaredUp and drill down to see its key performance stats and all its dependencies at a glance.

Our in-product search is not just a tool – it's part of an overall experience. Here’s what makes it stand out:

• Object-based search: Unlike traditional search features, ours is built on an object map. This means you can search for specific objects within your data, leading to more relevant results.
• Seamless drilldown: From search results, you can drill down to see detailed metrics and relationships, providing a comprehensive view of your data.
• Collaboration insights: Discover dashboards, tiles, and monitors created by your colleagues, fostering a collaborative environment where knowledge is shared effortlessly.

Tips and Tricks

The search box can be accessed anywhere in the product by using CTRL+K (or the equivalent on Mac). It supports operators (which should be capitalized) like AND, OR as well as properties for the graph object. For example, if you want to search for a virtual machine that has a tag property to refer whether it is on a Prod or Dev environment, you could use the following syntax:

web-server-01 (tag:PROD OR tag:DEV)

Check out the Search knowledge base for more details about the syntax and examples.

Behind the scenes

Where SquaredUp really shines, above and beyond dashboarding and alerting, is in its ability to let users explore all their data at their fingertips. To achieve this, we kept several key considerations in mind when building the search feature.

Our goal was to create a search experience that was not only robust and efficient but also deeply integrated with our object-based model. Our engineering team faced the challenge of returning results quickly. Leveraging our existing object map (our knowledge graph) was key to achieving this.

We conceptualized a search interface that was intuitive and useful. Search needed to integrate seamlessly with our drill down and perspectives features to allow users to easily understand the context around a metric or object.

Try the search feature and let us know what you think.

If you're new here and like what you're hearing, start your journey with SquaredUp today! Connect to your data and experience next generation dashboarding.