Timeline

A visual, at-a-glance grid of recent job activity over a time window.

The Timeline gives you a bird’s-eye view of everything your Salt deployment has been doing. Instead of reading jobs row by row on the Jobs page, you see every job invocation plotted as a bar against time — grouped into rows, colored by function category, and (for state runs) filled by their highstate result.

Like the rest of Halite’s read paths, the Timeline is served from the local database — it aggregates the jobs_index table together with ingested highstate_runs rather than calling the Salt master live. Running jobs are derived from the same in-memory active-JID cache the Jobs page uses.

Prerequisites

The Timeline reflects whatever the jobs-index poller has ingested. If the poller is not running, the page shows “Jobs scheduler not running — enable in Settings → Pollers” and stays empty. Enable it on the Settings page before relying on the Timeline.

Reading the timeline

The grid plots time on the horizontal axis across the selected window. Each row is a group, and each bar is a single job invocation:

• Rows group jobs by function name (the default) or by the user who dispatched them. Busiest groups sort to the top.
• Bars are positioned by start time. state.* jobs — whose completion Halite derives from highstate_runs — render as a bar with width; other jobs, where no exact end time is known, render as a short start marker.
• Row color comes from the function category, so state.*, cmd.*, pkg.*, and the rest are visually distinct at a glance.

Bar status

For state.* jobs the bar’s fill encodes the highstate outcome; other jobs are treated as complete once they leave the active-JID cache.

Status	Meaning
pass	State run succeeded with no changes, or a non-state job completed
changed	State run applied changes
failed	State run had one or more failures (red intensity scales with failed-minion count)
running	The JID is still in the active-JID cache
unknown	A state job whose result hasn’t been ingested yet

Function categories

The row label color is derived from the function prefix:

state · cmd · pkg · service · test · runner · wheel · manage · other

Functions that don’t match a known prefix fall into other.

Filters

A filter bar at the top of the page controls what’s plotted:

• Window — the time range to plot: 1 hour, 4 hours, 24 hours (default), or 7 days.
• Group by — Function (default) or User.
• Function filter — a case-insensitive substring match against the function name (e.g. state, cmd, pkg).
• User — restrict to jobs dispatched by a single Salt user.
• Include system — off by default. When off, Halite hides its own background traffic (runner.*, wheel.*, and manage.*) so the view shows operator-driven activity. Turn it on to see everything.

The Timeline caps the plot at the 2,000 most-recent jobs in the window to keep rendering smooth. A freshness indicator in the page header shows when the data was last polled and how many bars are displayed.

Inspecting a bar

Hover any bar to open a detail popover with the job’s jid, function, target, user, start time, and status. For state.* jobs it also shows the responding minion count and, when present, the failed-minion count.

To drill into full per-minion results, open the Jobs page and look up the same JID.

Permissions

Action	Permission
View the timeline (GET /api/jobs/timeline)	view:job:*

The built-in operator and viewer roles both have view:job:*, so both can use the Timeline. Every access is recorded in the audit log.