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The sources screen tells you what each source is doing now: storing, quiet, waiting for a secret. That is the question you have on the day. The question you have six weeks later is different. When did this go quiet? Had it ever delivered at all? Did anyone see it? Nothing recalled from memory answers those, and a silence nobody wrote down at the time is a silence that is simply gone. So the product writes each change down as it happens, and keeps all of them.

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What is recorded

A background job looks at every source on a schedule and compares what it sees to what it last saw. When the two differ, it writes one entry: Two of those need a word. Changed is when the change was seen, not when it happened — a schedule cannot see a thing at the instant it becomes true. Last seen before is the look that came immediately before it, so the change happened somewhere between the two. On a normally running schedule that window is minutes. If the job had been stopped for a day, the window says so rather than pretending to a precision it does not have. Connected and silence means something after are copied onto every entry rather than looked up on the source. They are the two dates that separate a source that never started from one that stopped, and that distinction has to survive the source moving on to something else.

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Reading it

Each source on the Sources screen carries its own history, newest first. Every change is kept. A source that goes quiet on a Tuesday and starts delivering again on the Friday leaves both entries behind, not just the later one — the history is a list of what happened, not a note of where things currently stand.

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Recording that you noticed

Beside each entry there is one thing you can add: that you saw it, and when. That is the other end of an interval nobody else can supply. The product knows when a source went quiet. Only you know when a person found out, and the gap between the two is the only measure of whether this screen is doing its job. Two things about the record:
  • The moment you noticed does not move. Once an entry is marked as noticed, a second visit does not overwrite the time. A time that could be rewritten later would make the gap unreadable.
  • What it turned out to be can be filled in afterwards, because on the day you notice you usually do not know yet. You can come back and say whether the source was genuinely broken, and whether you contacted the team on the other end about it.

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Nothing is sent to the team on the other end

A source going quiet is exactly the moment a product would like to email the team who set it up and tell them their integration looks dead. This one will not, and cannot. On the route we recommend for Sentry, a quiet source is usually a week in which nothing went wrong. We cannot tell that apart from an integration that was deleted, and an automated accusation sent to a team who lent us their production error data would be wrong most of the times it fired. So the path exists, it is tried every time a source falls silent, and it refuses every time. The refusal is written into the record beside the change, which is also how you know the message is yours to send. If you want the team to know, write to them yourself.

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What this is not

This is not the weekly volume read. How much a source delivered in a week is a different question from when it changed — a week of zero cannot say whether a source stopped on the Monday or the Saturday, or whether it had ever started. Both exist; neither answers the other.