April 2025

Overview

This month's release delivers powerful updates designed to enhance flexibility, scalability, and performance. This release introduces the new user-defined functions feature, a dedicated overview page for both Assets and Runs, advanced export options, dark mode, and a key performance improvement that significantly boosts the speed and capacity of scatter plots and GEO maps.

New: User-defined functions

User-defined functions let you define reusable logic using CEL (Common Expression Language) and reference it across both Rules and calculated Channels. User-defined functions improve readability and maintainability, making managing and sharing complex logic easier across your team.

To learn more, see User-defined functions.

New: Dedicated overview pages for Assets and Runs

Each Asset and Run in Sift now has its dedicated overview page, giving you a focused, organized view of its history, key details, and relevant data, all in one place.

New: Advanced export

The Export Data tool now includes an advanced export option. While Export as CSV generates a single-fidelity CSV file containing all plotted Channels, Advanced export offers additional flexibility, allowing you to:

Customize Channel name formatting for improved readability
Split data across multiple files to better handle large or complex datasets
Benefit from default, concise, and human-readable column headers

To learn more, see Advanced export.

New: Bytes Channel

We are excited to share that the bytes Channel type is now available, which enables you to ingest raw binary data directly through your ingestion configurations. This new primitive enables high-performance pipelines to work with non-text formats such as images, serialized data, and other binary payloads.

New: Dark mode

Sift now supports dark mode. Choose light mode, dark mode, or match your system setting.

Improvement: Performance boost for scatter plots and GEO maps

Scatter plots and GEO maps now load faster and handle much larger datasets to improve speed and ensure reliable performance across all devices, including lower-powered machines.

This update increases the limit on how much data you can visualize at once. Scatter plots and GEO maps can now display up to 200,000 points each, up from 10,000 and 50,000, respectively. This makes it easier to explore and interact with large datasets smoothly without running into performance issues.

What's coming next

Here's a glimpse into what's next:

Webhooks: Soon, you'll be able to bring Sift directly into your workflows with Webhooks. You will be able to trigger custom actions from Rules and automatically send real-time payloads to tools like PagerDuty, Slack, and JIRA.
Sorting and filtering: In future updates, you'll have advanced sorting and filtering at your fingertips across tables throughout Sift to zero in on the Assets and Runs you care about without digging around.
Archive Runs and Assets: The upcoming updates will help you keep your workspace clean and focused by allowing you to archive Runs and Assets you no longer need.
User-defined metadata (beta): Future updates will allow you to add key-value metadata pairs to your Runs and Assets to achieve richer context and easier discoverability. If you'd like to be one of the first to try it, please let us know, and we'll reserve your spot in the beta.
Explore redesign (beta): The Explore (page) experience will be significantly upgraded, including advanced charting and visualization capabilities. If you'd like to be one of the first to try it, please let us know, and we'll reserve your spot in the beta.

Recent partnerships

In the following blogs, learn why Manufacturo, Impulse Space, and K2 Space decided to partner with Sift:

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