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Release Notes

This page documents the latest changes and updates to SparkLogs. The application automatically updates to the latest version and cannot be downgraded. Backwards compatibility is a fundamental design principle to ensure that observability pipelines are not disrupted. Upgrades will not require changes to any ingestion pipeline or configuration.

Cloud Services v2025-10-27 - Event Size Trimming​

Features:​

  • Automatic event size trimming: Enforce limits on the size of each individual event: 512KiB for one log message and 3328KiB for custom field data in one event.
    • Individual events that exceed these limits will be automatically trimmed to fit within the allowed size.
    • Events that are trimmed in this way will have the custom __event_truncated_details field with details on what was trimmed. The LQL expression __event_truncated_details! can find all events that were trimmed.
    • This behavior can be customized through the X-Fail-When-Event-Too-Big header parameter.
  • Increase max ingestion payload request size to 40 MB.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Enhance supportability to diagnose failed authorization attempts and the associated workspace.

Cloud Services v2025-10-15 - Analytics Snapshots​

Features:​

  • Add automatic daily snapshots for game engine analytics data. Makes it easy to analyze long-term trends for DAU/MAU, retention, engagement, monetization, and more.
    • Snapshot cohorts can be segmented by user tags, install date, first purchase date, location, app version, and more.
    • Snapshots are retained for 7 years on paid plans.

Application v2025-10-13q - Download Org List​

Features:​

  • Download organization list in CSV format.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Improve display of lagging ingestion agents on dashboard.

Cloud Services v2025-10-08 - OpenTelemetry Collector Support​

Features:​

  • Add support to ingest data from OpenTelemetry Collector. Detection is automatic. No configuration is required.
  • Add search index support for integer and timestamp data types.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Improve ingestion payload deduplication to dedup ingest payloads as small as 1KB.
  • If there is no detected source field value for an event but the app field has a value, then also use the app field value for source.

Cloud Services v2025-09-23 - Materialized Views for Analytics​

Features:​

  • Add materialized views for game engine analytics data. Makes it easy and efficient to analyze analytics data and to analyze trends by analytics event ID.
    • Materialized views are always fresh and instantly up to date as new analytics data is ingested.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.9 [2025-09-15]​

Features:​

  • Dedup payloads across game engine crashes: enhances the plugin so that if a game engine process crashes after sending a payload and before it receives an acknowledgement of that payload, when the game engine restarts it will send the same payload again if possible.
    • It does this by remembering the size of the last payload as well as any common metadata used by the last game engine instance, allowing it to reconstruct an identical payload from the queue file.
    • This will allow the SparkLogs cloud to dedup such identical payload and prevent duplicate data from being received, even across game engine crashes/restarts.
  • Persist any custom analytics user ID across game engine restarts

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Reduce client batch interval to 12 seconds (send analytics data faster).
  • Use dedicated state INI file on desktop platforms (avoid rewriting larger user settings INI file now that we rewrite state more often).
  • Synchronize any physical writes of the INI file to avoid racing on this.
  • Fix unit tests randomly failing because of Unreal Engine caching old unit test state INI files.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.8 [2025-08-29]​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Client build configurations will send queued data after 30 seconds.
  • Adjust timeouts during shutdown so that at least 1 retry will happen no matter what.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.7 [2025-08-26]​

Features:​

  • Support multiple concurrent Unreal Engine game instances running at the same time for all types of data (including analytics data).

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Compatibility fixes for Unreal Engine 5.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.6 [2025-08-25]​

Features:​

  • Support multiple concurrent Unreal Engine game instances running at the same time (common in editor mode and QA environments) for log data data.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • The g_analytics.game_id field is renamed to g_analytics.app_id

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.5 [2025-08-19]​

Features:​

  • Greater resiliency for progress markers: prevent duplicate analytics data from being sent when there is third-party interference clearing the queued data file on engine shutdown.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Rotate the plugin ops log on startup if it's more than 5 MB (only affects servers).
  • Log session ID in default message for session start/end.
  • Only log value in default message if it's not null.
  • Wait up to 15 seconds instead of 6 for final flush at end of game.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.4 [2025-08-15]​

Features:​

  • First purchased timestamp in analytics data: The purchase analytics event now includes a first_purchased field with the timestamp of the first time a purchase was made since the game was installed.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.3 [2025-08-15] - Analytics User Tags​

Features:​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Purchase events properly record the transaction_num field value.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.2 [2025-08-11] - Support UE5 & Linux​

Features:​

  • Automatically adjust for inaccurate client clocks (uses the X-Client-Clock-Utc-Now ingestion request header).
  • Add compatibility for Unreal Engine up through version 5.6.
  • Add compatibility with Linux servers.
  • Support ingestion session affinity for SparkLogs cloud (improves performance through better caching).

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Analytics sessions automatically start on servers as needed.
  • Add plugin setting AnalyticsTargetCurrency to set the target currency for automatic currency conversion.
  • Eliminate race condition during engine startup if plugin is manually initialized.
  • Add FSparkLogsEngineOptions struct to group engine options together.

Cloud Services v2025-08-08 - Foreign Currency Conversion​

Features:​

  • Automatic foreign currency conversion from over 200 currencies to a choice of 10 base currencies (e.g., USD, EUR, etc.).
    • Makes it easy to normalize financial data in log or analytics data.
    • Currency conversion rates are automatically updated daily.

Cloud Services v2025-07-29 - GeoIP Lookups​

Features:​

  • Automatic GeoIP lookup for all IPs detected in ingested data and for the client IP submitting the ingestion request.
    • GeoIP lookups are best effort and use publicly available information to estimate the country of origin for IP addresses.
    • The country of the IP address of the client submitting the ingestion request is stored in the client_ip_location field.
    • GeoIP lookups for all IP addresses detected by AutoExtract are stored in the x.ips_location[] string array field. You can use LQL queries like x.ips_location=US or x.ips_location=(US,CA,DE) to find events with IP addresses associated with certain countries.
    • GeoIP can be disabled by setting the X-Calc-GeoIP header parameter to false in ingestion requests.

Cloud Services v2025-07-23​

Features:​

  • AutoExtract can now be disabled on a per-event basis by setting the __autoextract_disabled field to true in an event's metadata.
    • This is useful if you want to disable AutoExtract from extracting fields for only a subset of events in a particular ingestion payload.

Unreal Engine Plugin v1.0.1 [2025-07-04] - Game Engine Analytics​

Features:​

  • Ability to capture and send game engine analytics data:
    • Use the plugin to manage analytics sessions and capture design, progression, purchases, ads, resources, and error events.
    • Implements the standard Unreal Engine analytics interface so that existing analytics code works seamlessly.
    • Robust implementation captures analytics data even across game crashes, restarts, and periods when the machine is offline.
    • Supports both desktop, mobile, and server engine platforms.

Application v2025-50-20r - Improved Query UX​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Higher contrast and more compact log text display: remove horizontal gridlines, tighten spacing.
  • Revamped event text rendering: 2x-3x faster scrolling through large result sets + smooth scrollbar scrolling.
  • Load up to ~8000 matching events at a time (was 2000/query): helps you browse matching events faster and with fewer cloud queries. Browse up to 24000 matching events at a time.
  • Fully precise text-wrapping: Fixes the display of very long events that wrap at odd points (e.g., large JSON objects).
  • Better text selection support: Many text selection quirks were resolved. Text selection is now on by default in the matching event list.

Cloud Services v2025-04-24​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Optimize performance of full-text search index for certain international character encodings.

Cloud Services v2025-04-21 - Automatic Syslog Parsing​

Features:​

  • Automatic Syslog Parsing:
    • Automatically parse (semi) compliant syslog formats including RFC3164 and RFC5424, as well as many proprietary formats including Cisco, Juniper, SonicWall, WatchGuard, and Fortinet.
    • This includes proprietary formats that use key-value pair values after a syslog header.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Greatly improve recognition of edge case date/time formats, including odd ones that put the year after the time.
  • AutoExtract recognizes MAC addresses for AutoClassify.

Cloud Services v2025-02-17 - Self-Hosted Querying Service Plan​

Features:​

  • Launch Self-Hosted Querying service plan with even greater cost savings for large-scale environments.

Cloud Services v2025-01-28 - Quota Feature​

Features:​

  • Quota feature that allows setting hard limits on data ingestion per workspace per calendar month.
    • When the quota is reached, further ingestion is blocked until the start of the next calendar month.
    • Useful to enforce maximum monthly spend as well as enforce limits on certain service plans.

Application v2025-01-20x - Billable Usage Reporting​

Features:​

  • Adds billable usage reporting capabilities:
    • The ingested bytes chart on the dashboard lets you group by top agents or top organizations (defaults to by agent). The top 10 agents/organizations will be shown visually.
    • You can download a CSV report of all of the details behind the ingested bytes chart, which will have the details of all agents/organizations, not just the top 10.
    • On dashboard you can choose MTD, last month, or 2 months ago, etc., to help explore specific billable periods.

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • The dashboard now displays agents that previously were actively ingesting data but have not ingested any data in the last 2 hours. These agents will continue to be considered as lagging for 7 days.
  • The new agent / view agent API key dialog now displays template configurations for supported log forwarding tools & APIs.
  • The agent details pane now displays the name of the organization that owns the agent.

Application v2025-01-09a​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Improve massive-scale adaptive query performance and accuracy:
    • Fixes histogram bucket behavior for adaptive-scale queries.
    • More accurate events search for estimated query results.
    • Clarify language when results are estimated that zooming in will add more precision.
  • When toggling text selection preserve visible events.
  • Fix scrolling in date/time picker using mouse wheel.
  • Upgrade to Flutter 3.27 and reduce CPU/GPU overhead when app is idle.
  • Copying a field or events as LQL will use equals operator for greater efficiency.

Application v2025-01-02w - Massive-Scale Adaptive Querying​

Features:​

  • Massive-Scale Adaptive Querying Feature:
    • Quickly query any scale of data in seconds -- queries over large time scales (e.g., weeks/months/years) will now be very fast and show estimated results.
    • Estimated results will be shown on the histogram using a stacked area graph to convey shape; precise results will continue to use a stacked column chart.
    • Estimated results will be clearly labeled and will indicate the degree of precision.
    • Pattern analysis also works quickly over large-scales.
    • Events retrieval has been tuned to be 10x more efficient for massive-scale queries.
    • Histogram better displays very large numbers (for results with billions of hits).
  • Filtering by Sources Feature:
    • Easily filter by one or more log sources using the new sources drop-down filter (next to org drop-down filter).
    • View the top 50k log sources over the time period (sorted by most common first).

Application v2024-12-21w - Lagging Data Sources & Deduplication​

Features:​

  • Track lagging data sources and display ingestion health on dashboard.
    • Provide ability to copy detailed report to get list of lagging data sources.
  • Deduplicate ingestion payloads larger than 16 KB (from same agent/IP).
    • Data sources that send duplicate packets will be marked as a lagging source for 30 minutes.
    • Data sources that send log events whose timestamps are older than 70 minutes will be marked as lagging for 30 minutes.

Application v2024-12-19w​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Logout loop solved if multiple browser tabs open
  • Date/time picker implemented (known issue: time picker only works with touchscreen)
  • Download context menu will warn if query parameters have changed since last search
  • Search will automatically trigger if org selection changes

Application v2024-12-07 - Download Query Results​

Features:​

  • Download query results as text, LQL, CSV, or NDJSON:
    • Download up to the first 1 million matching events for the current query.
    • Even large exports take less than 30 seconds to generate and download in compressed zip format.
    • Download links contain an embedded auth token and can be shared with others for up to 48 hours for easy collaboration outside your organization.

Application v2024-11-23s​

Maintenance & Improvements:​

  • Fixed text wrapping so long JSON would not have cut off text.
  • Implemented optimizations so vertical scrolling is faster for large result sets. Text selection in the main grid is off by default but can be enabled with a toggle button.
  • Implemented a copy-to-clipboard button in the log context pane.