July 2025

Overview

This month's release notes introduce foundational upgrades across the Sift workspace. Explore 2 (Beta) is now live, delivering a rebuilt exploration experience with sharper visuals, faster performance, and more flexible workflows. We’ve also rolled out protective rate limiting for high-volume data access and brought back flexible Channel search for faster navigation. Together, these updates give teams deeper visibility, more reliable performance, and a smoother path from raw data to answers.

New: Explore 2 (Beta)

• Overview: Explore 2 (Beta) is a full rebuild of Sift’s Explore workspace for telemetry analysis, designed for speed, precision, and control. Now available in Beta, this update enhances several aspects of the exploration workflow to help teams move faster, compare signals more effectively, and uncover root causes with less friction. It introduces capabilities such as multi-chart layouts, cross-source plotting, smarter Channel selection, advanced styling, and X+Y zoom, along with performance improvements including nanosecond resolution and significantly faster rendering, especially on Linux. The redesign is grounded in direct input from teams working with high-frequency, mission-critical data.
  • To learn more, see Explore 2 (Beta)’s Tutorial, Reference, and How-to guide.
• Unlocked: Explore 2 (Beta) gives teams greater control and clarity when working with high-frequency telemetry. Whether you're troubleshooting a system fault, comparing behavior across Assets, or surfacing trends across large datasets, the new workspace is built to accelerate that process. The result: faster root cause analysis, clearer comparisons, and less time spent wrangling data.

New: GetData rate limiting

• Overview: Sift now includes rate limiting for GetData requests across many of our interfaces, including the API, Grafana plugin, and Explore v1. This change is designed to protect system stability without disrupting normal usage, especially for users running automated or large-scale queries.
• Unlocked: This feature introduces a protective layer that limits excessively parallel queries or long-running scripts that could affect performance for others. The rate limiter is configured with generous thresholds based on real usage data and has been running in dry-run mode for validation. Importantly, this does not apply to Explore 2 (Beta), which uses a separate data path. Teams relying on GetData via these interfaces should expect no impact under normal usage but will benefit from improved overall reliability.

Restored: Keyword search in the Channel selector

• Overview: Explore’s Channel selector now supports keyword search using multiple partial terms. This restores a popular search behavior previously referred to as "fuzzy Channel search" by users. You can now locate Channels more efficiently, even when you don’t remember the exact name or formatting.
• Unlocked: You can search using multiple space-separated keywords, and each will be matched independently within the Channel name, regardless of order. For example, typing max_ground temp will successfully match max_ground_temp(C). This improves discoverability for long or inconsistently named Channels and streamlines navigation across large datasets.

What is coming next

• Explore 2 (Beta): In future updates, additional features will round out the next-generation Explore workspace. Upcoming updates will include bulk plotting, undo zoom, and support for Views from the original Explore. Table interleaved mode will improve log alignment by joining data on timestamp, and long time-range discovery will make it easier to locate data across years of history. Live mode will support real-time monitoring, global page sync will unify panel time ranges, and Annotations will help capture key events. Chart types such as Geo Map, Metrics, and Histogram will also be introduced to extend visualization options.
• NaN handling: Soon, you’ll be able to ingest and operate on NaN, +Infinity, and -Infinity values in float and double Channels. These special values were previously filtered out and sent to the dead-letter queue (DLQ) but will now be accepted and available in Rules, visualizations, and analysis. To support this safely, new built-in functions like isnan, isinf, and isfinite will give you precise control in Calculated Channels. This unlocks more flexibility for telemetry analysis but also requires care in downstream logic such as rolling averages and comparisons.
• Identity Provider (IdP): Soon, you will be able to integrate your Identity Provider (IdP) with Sift, enabling secure and streamlined group management directly through your existing IdP setup.
• User-defined Metadata (GA): Future updates will allow admins to standardize key creation, making it easier to organize resources with consistent metadata. This will enhance search and filtering across the app and ensure metadata can be applied uniformly to all resource types.

Announcements

• Manifesto: Ever wonder why Sift was created? It wasn’t to build more software; it was to fix the fragile infrastructure that slows down the teams building our most complex machines. We’ve published a manifesto that lays out what we’re building and why it matters. Download manifesto.
• Webinar recording: Traceability isn’t just a compliance checkbox anymore; it’s now mission-critical infrastructure. In our latest webinar, we break down how leading aerospace and defense teams are unifying hardware genealogy across build, test, and operations to move faster and reduce risk. Whether you missed the live session or want to revisit key insights, the full recording is now available here.

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