Activity timelines for platform services and cloud portal

[scotwells]

Summary

With Activity v0.3.0, we introduced semantic activity timelines that translate raw audit events into clear, human-readable summaries. DNS was the first service to ship activity timelines and the staff portal was the first to integrate the activity UI.

This enhancement covers the next phase: bringing human-friendly activity timelines to all platform services and making them available to end users through the cloud portal.

Users can already see project and organization activity today through raw audit logs, but these are technical and hard to parse. Activity timelines replace that experience with clear descriptions of what happened — like "Sarah created HTTP proxy api-gateway" instead of a raw API call record.

Motivation

When users want to understand what's been happening in their project, they shouldn't need to read raw audit payloads. Activity timelines give users immediate answers to everyday questions:

• "What changed in my project today?"
• "Who updated the gateway configuration?"
• "Did my domain finish verifying?"
• "When were permissions last changed?"

Expanding activity coverage to all platform services and surfacing it in the cloud portal means every user gets this visibility — not just staff.

Goals

• Cover all user-facing platform services with human-readable activity summaries
• Design and polish the activity UI for end-user readiness in the cloud portal
• Provide both per-resource and project-wide activity views
• Maintain the quality bar set by DNS activity timelines for summary clarity and usefulness

Non-Goals

• Compute resources (Workloads, Instances, Networks, Subnets, Locations, etc.) — not yet exposed to end users
• Alerting or notifications based on activity
• Exporting activity logs to external systems

Service Coverage

Network Services

Resource	Description
Domain	Domain registration and verification lifecycle
HTTPProxy	HTTP proxy configuration and readiness
Gateway	Gateway creation and traffic management
HTTPRoute	Route rules for directing traffic to backends
TrafficProtectionPolicy	WAF and traffic protection rules (observe/enforce)
Connector	Hybrid connectivity between environments

Example activity summaries:

• "You created HTTP proxy api-gateway"
• "Your gateway is ready and accepting traffic"
• "Sarah added a route for /api/v2 to gateway main"
• "Domain example.com has been verified"
• "Traffic protection enabled in enforce mode on gateway main"
• "Connector on-prem-link established connectivity"

Identity & Access

Resource	Description
User	User invitations and membership
RoleBinding	Permission grants and revocations

Permission changes are some of the most important activities to surface clearly:

• "Alex invited taylor@example.com to the project"
• "Morgan granted Editor role to the DevOps team"
• "A role binding was removed for service-deployer"

Resource Management

Resource	Description
Organization	Top-level organizational units
Project	Project lifecycle within organizations
ConfigMap	Application configuration
Secret	Sensitive configuration (values never shown)

Example activity summaries:

• "You created project staging-west"
• "Alex updated ConfigMap feature-flags"
• "A secret was updated in namespace production"

Telemetry

Resource	Description
ExportPolicy	Telemetry export pipeline configuration

Example activity summaries:

• "You created an export policy for metrics"
• "Your export pipeline is active and delivering data"
• "Export to monitoring-endpoint failed — we'll keep retrying"

Cloud Portal Design & Integration

The activity UI is currently integrated into the staff portal. Before bringing it to the cloud portal, it needs a design pass to ensure the right level of polish for end users:

• Review and refine the activity timeline visual design for the cloud portal context
• Ensure the UI works well on resource detail pages (per-resource timeline) and at the project level (aggregated feed)
• Consider empty states, loading behavior, and how activity fits into the overall page layout
• Validate that the experience feels cohesive with the rest of the cloud portal

Suggested Approach

1. Design — UI/UX review and refinement of the activity timeline for end-user readiness
2. Network Services — High visibility, natural extension of DNS work
3. Resource Management — Core resources users interact with daily
4. Identity & Access — Important for security and team collaboration visibility
5. Telemetry — Smaller surface area, can proceed independently
6. Cloud Portal Integration — Can begin in parallel with service work once design is finalized

Related

• Parent enhancement: Semantic activity logs #469
• Activity v0.3.0 release: https://github.com/datum-cloud/activity/releases/tag/v0.3.0
• DNS activity timeline (reference implementation): feat: DNS activity timeline dns-operator#25
• Staff portal activity UI: feat(activity-hub): integrate staff portal with activity service staff-portal#349