Recent changes and improvements to Dash0

New Feature: Filter Variable Dependencies

Dashboard filter variables now support dependency relationships, enabling powerful hierarchical filtering workflows. Create intuitive drill-down experiences where variables automatically filter based on selections from parent variables.

Key Improvements:

• Dependency Chains: Configure filter variables to depend on other variables (e.g., Region → Service → Environment)
• Automatic Filtering: Child variables dynamically show only relevant options based on parent selections
• Smart Defaults: New filter variables automatically inherit dependencies from existing variables
• Circular Dependency Protection: Built-in safeguards prevent invalid dependency loops
• Enhanced User Experience: Progressive filtering provides more intuitive dashboard interactions

What's New:

• Configuration settings for filter variables
• Automatic dependency selection when creating new filter variables
• Improved handling of empty filter states with intelligent operator adjustments
• Support for complex multi-level filtering scenarios

This enhancement makes dashboard filtering more powerful and user-friendly, allowing you to build sophisticated observability views that guide users through their data exploration journey.

This launch makes it easier than ever for AWS customers to get started with Dash0. With just a few clicks, you can create a Dash0 organization and begin leveraging its powerful capabilities, reusing your existing billing setup on AWS!

Key Benefits:

• Seamless Integration: Instantly create your Dash0 organization directly from the AWS Marketplace and hit the ground running.
• Simplified Billing: Enjoy the convenience of consolidated billing through AWS—no additional invoices or account management headaches. No credit card required!

Visit Dash0's listing on the AWS Marketplace to get started today and enjoy the best OpenTelemetry-native observability!

By the way: did you know that sending your logs and metrics through the AWS Firehose to Dash0 is just a matter of few clicks?

What's New

• Sticky Tooltips with Alt Key: Press and hold the Option/Alt key while hovering over tooltips to freeze them in place.
• Interactive Content: Once a tooltip is sticky, you can interact with its contents - perfect for exploring large datasets, reviewing span events, or analyzing correlated logs.
• Scrollable Long Content: Sticky tooltips support scrolling, making it easy to navigate through extensive information.
• Visual Guidance: A helpful indicator shows when sticky mode is available and active.

This feature is especially valuable when working with:

• Dashboards containing long data series
• Trace Explorer with multiple span events or correlated logs
• Any tooltip containing interactive elements

Enhanced Trace Explorer Experience

We've also improved the Trace Explorer by automatically expanding attributes for selected span events and log records. Now when you click on a span event, the relevant attributes are immediately displayed, eliminating the need for additional clicks and making your debugging workflow faster and more efficient.Why This Matters for Real Users

Working with complex observability data brings unique challenges that our sticky tooltips directly address:

• Eliminate the "hover dance": No more trying to keep your cursor perfectly still while reading lengthy error messages or studying detailed metrics.
• Reduce cognitive load: Focus on understanding the data rather than fighting the UI to keep information visible.
• Save valuable time: What used to require screenshots or note-taking can now be accomplished with a simple key press.
• Improve debugging accuracy: Inspect and compare detailed trace data without losing context when your cursor moves.
• Prevent frustration: When investigating critical issues, the last thing you need is disappearing information as you try to interact with it.

See it in action

Here are two examples showing how Sticky Tooltips enhance usability in different parts of the product:

• Dashboard View: Explore long data series using scrollable, interactive tooltips

• Trace Explorer: Freeze tooltips to inspect span events and logs without losing context

We’re excited to introduce our new NGINX log processor. Whether you're running NGINX in a standard deployment or using it as a Kubernetes Ingress Controller, Dash0 now handles it all. We automatically detect the format, extract structured data, and enrich it with semantic attributes that follow OpenTelemetry conventions—making it easier than ever to monitor and understand what’s happening in your services.

Automatic Detection & Parsing

We’ve built support for multiple common NGINX access log formats:

• Minimal Format – Essential request and response data
• Combined Format – Adds referer and user agent info
• Ingress Controller Format – Captures forwarded IPs
• Kubernetes Upstream Info – Includes upstream metrics and request IDs

You don’t need to write a single regex or modify your log format—just send your logs to Dash0 and we’ll handle the rest.

Semantic Enrichment Built In

We map NGINX variables to OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, giving you consistent and queryable log data across your entire stack.

Here are some examples what we extract and enrich:

Client Information:

• $remote_addrCopy → client.addressCopy

Request Attributes:

• $request_methodCopy → http.request.methodCopy
• $request_uriCopy → url.pathCopy
• $server_protocolCopy → network.protocol.nameCopy and network.protocol.versionCopy
• $http_user_agentCopy → user_agent.originalCopy

Response Data:

• $statusCopy → http.response.status_codeCopy

This enrichment makes your logs more powerful, helping you correlate issues, create cleaner dashboards, and reduce your mean time to resolution.

Smarter Logs with Severity Detection

We’ve also introduced automatic severity inference based on HTTP status codes. Now your access logs are classified as:

• INFOCopy – for 1xx, 2xx, and 3xx responses
• WARNCopy – for 4xx client errors
• ERRORCopy – for 5xx server errors

This means you can filter logs by severity level without having to configure anything manually.

It’s Available Now

This feature is now live for all Dash0 users. Just forward your NGINX access logs to us—no changes needed on your end. We’ll handle the parsing, structuring, and enrichment automatically.

We've added two new settings to alerting webhooks for greater flexibility:

• Follow Redirects: Enable this to automatically handle HTTP 3xxCopy redirect responses from your endpoint, ensuring smoother alert delivery for services using redirects (e.g., for load balancing or HTTPS enforcement).
• Allow Insecure (Non-Production Only): This option permits connections to development or internal services using self-signed/private SSL/TLS certificates by bypassing certificate validation. Crucial Security Warning: Enabling "Allow Insecure" exposes your connection to Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attacks.
  • NEVER transmit sensitive data with this option active.
  • Strictly for non-production environments. Do NOT use in production.

Find these new options in your alerting webhook configurations:

An example of a webhook that has been configured to follow redirects and allow insecure requests.

Seamless Incident Routing

​​All Quiet joins our lineup of supported incident management tools, including PagerDuty and Opsgenie. This gives you more flexibility in how and where you manage incidents, allowing you to integrate Dash0 into your existing workflows effortlessly.

Key Benefits

• Automated issue forwarding to All Quiet for centralized incident tracking and resolution.
• Faster response times with real-time SMS, Voice Call and Push Notification alerting triggered by check rule failures.
• Clickable annotation links to instantly access related dashboards, documentation, or tools.

With this integration, you can streamline your alerting and response process, reduce noise, and maintain full visibility across your operations.

More details on how to set up the All Quiet integration can be found in our integration hub.

Stay Informed, React Faster

​​With the new Atlassian integrations, you can now receive real-time alerts directly within your Atlassian ecosystem. When a Dash0 checkrule fails, an immediate notification is sent to your chosen Atlassian platform, ensuring incidents are addressed with the appropriate urgency and context. In addition incidents are automatically closed once the checkrule returns to a healthy state, streamlining incident management and reducing manual effort.

Why These Integrations Matter

• Seamless Integration: Connect your Dash0 alerts directly to Jira Service Management Ops and Opsgenie.
• Real-Time Notifications: Get instant alerts when checkrules fail, minimizing downtime.
• Enhanced Context: Ensure incidents are assigned with appropriate urgency and context.
• Incident Auto-Closure: Incidents are automatically closed once the checkrule returns to a healthy state.
• Clickable Hyperlinks: Render any URLs within checkrule annotations as clickable hyperlinks improving visibility and quick access to supporting dashboards, documentation or tools.

More details on how to set up both Atlassian integrations can be found in our integration hub:

• Jira Service Management Ops
• Opsgenie

The Hierarchy Map organizes your resources in a way that makes it easy to identify patterns, spot degraded resources, and understand hierarchical relationships, even with extensive datasets. Resources can be grouped by various attributes, allowing you to create meaningful visualizations that match your mental model of your infrastructure.

Key Features of the Hierarchy Map Widget

• Condensed and Clear Visualization: Effectively display a large number of resources and their connections in a visually efficient format.
• Flexible Grouping Options: Group resources by any attribute to create meaningful hierarchies that match your organizational structure or technical architecture.
• Health-Based Visualization: Quickly identify problematic resources through color-coding based on health status, making it easy to spot issues within large datasets.
• Customizable Appearance: Adjust item size, spacing, and summary display to optimize the visualization for clarity and information density.
• Smart Sorting: Sort groups and items by name or health status to prioritize your view based on what matters most in your extensive infrastructure.

The Hierarchy Map widget is available now in your dashboards. Simply add it to any dashboard and configure it to visualize your resources in a way that makes sense for your organization, even with a high volume of data.

This new visualization complements our existing widgets, giving you yet another powerful tool to gain insights from your observability data, particularly when dealing with numerous resources.

This new dash0-enabledCopy annotation works on an individual check rule basis. It allows you to temporarily or permanently disable or enable check rules via the Dash0 UI, APIs or Dash0 Operator

prometheus-example-rule.yml
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apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1
kind: PrometheusRule
metadata:
  labels:
    prometheus: example
    role: alert-rules
  name: prometheus-example-rule
spec:
  groups:
    - name: dash0/k8s
      interval: 5m
      rules:
        - alert: K8s pod crash looping
          expr: "increase(kube_pod_container_status_restarts_total[1m]) > $__threshold"
          annotations:
            description: "Pod labels.namespace/labels.pod is crash looping. VALUE = value, LABELS = labels"
            summary: "K8s pod crash looping K8s pod crash looping {{ $label. k8s_node_name }}"
            dash0-enabled: "false" # false to disable and true (default) to enable
            dash0-threshold-degraded: "10"
            dash0-threshold-critical: "15"

Stay Informed with real-time alerts

With the new "ilert" and "Discord" integrations, you'll receive immediate notifications whenever a Dash0 check rule enters a failure state. This allows you to address incidents promptly, minimizing downtime and potential impact. These new options ensure you're always in the loop when it matters most.

Key features

• Real-time notifications on check rule failures: Get instant alerts in "ilert" or "Discord" when a Dash0 check rule fails, enabling quick responses and issue resolution.
• Enhanced annotation display with hyperlinked references: Any URLs within check rule annotations will be rendered as clickable hyperlinks, providing easy access to supporting dashboards, documentation, or tools, which streamlines your workflow.

More details on how to set up the integrations can be found in our integration hub:

• ilert
• Discord