CVAT Analytics and monitoring

Instructions for deployment and customization of analytics and monitoring.

CVAT Analytics suite of tools is designed to track and understand users’ behavior, system performance, and for identifying potential issues in your application.

You can also visualize user activity through Grafana, and aggregate user working time by the jobs.

Gathered logs can be additionally filtered for efficient debugging.

By using analytics, you’ll gain valuable insights to optimize your system and enhance user satisfaction.

CVAT analytics are available from the top menu.

CVAT Analytics

Note: CVAT analytics and monitoring are available only for on-prem solution.

See:

High-level architecture

The CVAT analytics is based on Vector, ClickHouse, and Grafana.

CVAT Analytics

CVAT Analytics

CVAT and its analytics module can be set up locally, for self-hosted solution analytics are enabled by default.

For detailed CVAT installation instructions, see Installation Guide or refer to the CVAT Course for installation videos.

All analytics-related features will be launched when you start CVAT containers with the following command:

docker compose up -d

Ports settings

If you cannot access analytics on development environnement, see Analytics Ports

Events log structure

Relational database schema with the following fields:

Field Description
scope Scope of the event (e.g., zoomin:image, add:annotations, delete:image, update:assignee).
obj_name Object name or None (e.g., task, job, cloudstorage, model, organization).
obj_id Object identifier as in DB or None.
obj_val Value for the event as string or None (e.g., frame number, number of added annotations).
source Who generates the log event (e.g., server, ui).
timestamp Local event time (in general for UI and server, the time is different).
count How many times in the row it occurs.
duration How much time does it take (it can be 0 for events without duration).
project_id Project ID or None.
task_id Task ID or None.
job_id Job ID or None.
user_id User ID or None.
user_name User name or None.
user_email User email or None.
org_id Organization ID or None.
org_slug Organization slug or None.
payload JSON payload or None. Extra fields can be added to the JSON blob.

Types of supported events

Supported events change the scope of information displayed in Grafana.

Supported Events

Server events:

  • create:project, update:project, delete:project

  • create:task, update:task, delete:task

  • create:job, update:job, delete:job

  • create:organization, update:organization, delete:organization

  • create:user, update:user, delete:user

  • create:cloudstorage, update:cloudstorage, delete:cloudstorage

  • create:issue, update:issue, delete:issue

  • create:comment, update:comment, delete:comment

  • create:annotations, update:annotations, delete:annotations

  • create:label, update:label, delete:label

  • export:dataset, import:dataset

Client events:

  • load:cvat

  • load:job, save:job, restore:job

  • upload:annotations

  • send:exception

  • send:task_info

  • draw:object, paste:object, copy:object, propagate:object, drag:object, resize:object, delete:object, lock:object, merge:objects

  • change:attribute

  • change:label

  • change:frame

  • zoom:image, fit:image, rotate:image

  • action:undo, action:redo

  • press:shortcut

  • send:debug_info

  • run:annotations_action

  • click:element

Request id for tracking

Note, that every response to an API request made to the the server includes a header named X-Request-Id, for example: X-Request-Id: 6a2b7102-c4b9-4d57-8754-5658132ba37d.

This identifier is also recorded in all server events that occur as a result of the respective request.

For example, when an operation to create a task is performed, other related entities such as labels and attributes are generated on the server in addition to the Task object.

All events associated with this operation will have the same request_id in the payload field.

Fetching event data as CSV from the /api/events endpoint

The /api/events endpoint allows the fetching of event data with filtering parameters such as org_id, project_id, task_id, job_id, and user_id.

For more details, see Swagger API Documentation.

For example, to fetch all events associated with a specific job, the following curl command can be used:

curl --user 'user:pass' https://app.cvat.ai/api/events?job_id=123

In the response, you will receive a query ID:

{ "query_id": "150cac1f-09f1-4d73-b6a5-5f47aa5d0031" }

As this process may take some time to complete, the status of the request can be checked by adding the query parameter query_id to the request:

curl -I --user 'user:pass' https://app.cvat.ai/api/events?job_id=123&query_id=150cac1f-09f1-4d73-b6a5-5f47aa5d0031

Upon successful creation, the server will return a 201 Created status:

HTTP/2 201
allow: GET, POST, HEAD, OPTIONS
date: Tue, 16 May 2023 13:38:42 GMT
referrer-policy: same-origin
server: Apache
vary: Accept,Origin,Cookie
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-frame-options: DENY
x-request-id: 4631f5fa-a4f0-42a8-b77b-7426fc298a85

The CSV file can be downloaded by adding the action=download query parameter to the request:

curl --user 'user:pass' https://app.cvat.ai/api/events?job_id=123&query_id=150cac1f-09f1-4d73-b6a5-5f47aa5d0031&action=download > /tmp/events.csv

This will download and save the file to /tmp/events.csv on your local machine.

Dashboards

By default, three dashboards are available in CVAT.

To access them, click General, you will be forwarded to the page with available dashboards.

List of dashboards

Dashboard Description
All Events Dashboard that shows all event logs, timestamps, and source.
Management Dashboard with information about user activities such as working time by job and so on.
Monitoring Dashboard showing server logs, including errors.

Dashboard: All Events

The dashboard shows all events, their timestamps, and their source.

Dashboard: All Events

Element Description
Filters Can be used as drop-down lists or search fields. Click on the arrow to activate.
Overall activity Graph that shows the overall activity by the selected filters.
Scope Users’ activity, see Types of supported events.
obj_name Object or item related to the Scope.
obj_id Object’s id. Might be empty.
source Source of the event, can be client or server.
timestamp Time when the event happened.
count Common field for all events, not null where it makes sense, for example, the
number of saved objects in an annotation.
duration Duration in milliseconds.
project_id Id of the project.
project_id Id of the project.
task_id ID of the task.
job_id ID of the job.

There are two fields with statistics at the bottom of the dashboard, about browser and OS users use.

Click on the column name to enable a filter.

If you want to inspect the value, hover over it and click on the eye icon.

Dashboard: Management

The dashboard shows user activity.

Dashboard: Management

Element Description
Filters Can be used as drop-down lists or search fields. Click on the arrow to activate.
User activity Graph that shows when the user was active (data and time), click on the user id below, to see the graph for the dedicated user.
Overall activity Graph shows common activity for all users.
User User ID.
Project Project ID. Might be empty.
Task Task ID. Might be empty.
Job Job ID. Might be empty.
Working time(h) Time spent on task in hours.
Activity Number of events for each user.

Click on the column name to enable a filter.

If you want to inspect the value, hover over it and click on the eye icon.

Dashboard: Monitoring

The dashboard shows server logs, helps handle errors, and shows user activity.

Dashboard: Monitoring

Element Description
Filters Can be used as drop-down lists or search fields. Click on the arrow to activate.
Active users (now) Number of active users on an instance.
Overall activity Graph that shows the number of active users.
Exceptions Graph that shows the number of errors that happened in the instance.
timestamp Time when the error happened.
user_id User ID.
user_name User nickname.
project_id Id of the project. Might be empty.
task_id Task ID. Might be empty.
job_id Job ID. Might be empty.
error Error description
stack Error description
payload Error description
stack Stack trace, which is a report of the active stack frames at a certain point in time during the execution. This information is typically used for debugging purposes to locate where an issue occurred.
payload JSON that describes the entire object, which contains several properties. This data in the payload is related to an event that was created as a result of a failed API request. The payload contains information about this event.

Click on the column name to enable a filter.

If you want to inspect the value, hover over it and click on the eye icon.

Dashboards setup

You can adjust the dashboards. To do this, click on the graph or table name and from the drop-down menu select Edit.

Adjust the query in the editor.

Dashboard: look and feel

Example of query:

SELECT
    time,
    uniqExact(user_id) Users
FROM
(
    SELECT
      user_id,
      toStartOfInterval(timestamp, INTERVAL 15 minute) as time
    FROM cvat.events
    WHERE
      user_id IS NOT NULL
    GROUP BY
      user_id,
      time
    ORDER BY time ASC WITH FILL STEP toIntervalMinute(15)
)
GROUP BY time
ORDER BY time

Note, that by default the updated configuration will not be saved and will be reset to the default parameters after you restart the container.

To save the updated configuration, do the following:

  1. Update Configuration: Start by making your desired changes in the query.

  2. Apply Changes: Once you’ve made your changes, click the Apply button to ensure the changes are implemented.

    Apply changes

  3. Save Configuration: To save your applied changes, on the top of the dashboard, click the Save button.

    Apply changes

  4. Replace Configuration File: After saving, replace the existing Grafana dashboard configuration file is located at components/analytics/grafana/dashboards with the new JSON configuration file.

    Apply changes

  5. Restart Grafana Service: To ensure, that all changes take effect, restart the Grafana service. If you’re using Docker Compose, execute the following command: docker compose restart cvat_grafana.

For more information, see Grafana Dashboards.

Example of use

This video demonstrates available by default CVAT analytics features.