topic Define business hours in DQL

Define business hours

sinisa_zubic — Wed, 31 May 2023 14:02:17 GMT

Hi Team,

how could I define business hours with DQL? I looked at filtering on the timestamp but can't really find a way. For example: for monday to friday, 08am to 7pm.

Best,
Sini

Re: Define business hours

educampver — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 14:55:59 GMT

Hi Sinisa, the Notebooks app has a snippet for this use case:

Here's the query anyways:

fetch bizevents, from:now()-7d, to:now() | fieldsAdd hour=toLong(formatTimestamp(timestamp,format:"H")), day_of_week = formatTimestamp(timestamp,format:"EE") | filterOut day_of_week == "Sat" or day_of_week == "Sun" // Remove weekend days | filterOut hour <= 5 or hour >= 15 // Remove everything that is not between 5am and 3pm

Re: Define business hours

gdalessandro — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 16:41:18 GMT

How would you do this using the timeseries command (using metrics)?

Re: Define business hours

krzysztof_hoja — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:04:39 GMT

I would suggest to use getHour() and getDayOfWeek() functions instead of formatTimestamp() and conversion.

Re: Define business hours

krzysztof_hoja — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:15:47 GMT

For timeseries you can also use getHour() and getDayOfWeek() functions, but you need first timestamps of particular buckets using start() funtion, so you can filter out irrelevant values:

timeseries {d=avg(dt.host.cpu.usage), timestamp=start()}, interval:1h | fieldsAdd d = if(getHour(timestamp[])>=7 and getHour(timestamp[])<=16 and not in(getDayOfWeek(timestamp[]), {6,7}) , d[]) | fieldsRemove timestamp

Re: Define business hours

Julius_Loman — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 11:59:27 GMT

While this works for "common cases", it's much more difficult to implement a calendar-based business hours considering, for example, holidays during working days or other events.

One approach I still use with customers is a "calendar metric" representing business availability and then you can use it in the DQL to filter by multiplication.

See details of it in this post . Even though this was originally developed for classic metrics for SLO calculation purposes, it can be used with DQL / Grail in the very same way.

Re: Define business hours

krzysztof_hoja — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:19:50 GMT

Yes, if you have fact of being in or out of business hours ingested in Grail as indpendent timeseries, you can use it to filter any other timeseries with data,