Thanks for jumping in! I totally get that the State Timeline panel is designed for a different use case, but here’s where I ran into trouble trying to use it for event duration visualization:
- Padding with nulls: To show durations that occur at specific times (e.g., a task from 04:00 to 04:11), I had to pad the data with nulls or dummy values for all the times when that event wasn’t active. This gets messy fast, especially when events are sparse or irregular.
- Infinite end times: The State Timeline assumes that the last state continues indefinitely. That makes sense for monitoring stateful systems, but it’s a problem when I want to show discrete durations—like a task that ended 10 minutes ago and isn’t currently active. There’s no clean way to say “this event ended and nothing followed.”
So while I understand the design philosophy behind State Timeline, it’s a bit too rigid for use cases where I just want to show event durations at various points in time—especially when:
- Events don’t happen continuously.
- Some events overlap.
- Some events are in the past and not currently active.
Have you ever needed to visualize discrete event durations like this? If so, how did you approach it?