Displaying the absence of an end event since the most recent start event in Datadog Events dashboard

Hello! Have a “is this even possible” question regarding Datadog Events and their dashboard queries. :slightly_smiling_face:

We have a system that already successfully emits DataDog events at various stages in its workflow. We wondered if it was possible / sane put up a dashboard widget showing, in pseudo-query, count(start_event) - count(end_event) , with the result being 1 if the relevant task is running, and 0 if it was done.

As you can probably imagine, this runs into issues where, for any chosen time range, we might see the most recent start event and the previous end event, which makes the 0/1 output a very unreliable indicator of whether anything is currently in-flight.

Is there any feature I’m overlooking here that might let us display something like “we haven’t seen an end_event since the most recent start_event “? Right off the bat I don’t see a way to express a “most recent” event, but even if I could, I also don’t see much way to correlate different events other than do math on their counts.

Not a big deal for us if it’s not actually possible, but it’d be nice to have and I thought I’d ask if anyone had any ideas!

do you have DD audit logs?
Looks like the workflow audit logs includes details on start/complete for each time a workflow executes

looks like the audit trail includes each step of the workflow action, id think you could use that to monitor when a workflows get stuck in a step

No, doesn’t seem so. Or if we do, it’s not broadly accessible. Not sure this is relevant anyway though? The Events I’m referencing are custom service-emitted events, and not :datadog: API/product internal ones