[FR] Display 'Start Time' as an absolute timestamp and not a relative reference

Willingness to contribute

No. I cannot contribute this feature at this time.

Proposal Summary

In previous versions, ‘Start Time’ used to be displayed as an absolute timestamp (something like “%d.%m.%Y, %H:%M:%S”). At some point, it was changed to relative references (like ‘3 hours ago’). Please change this back or allow the user to choose. It is very inconvenient trying to identify the runs like this: first, you have to count the days, and second, the farther back, the less specific the references become: there can be hundreds of runs, say, 5 days ago - and they are all ‘5 days ago’ and thousands of runs 5 months ago and they are all just ‘5 months ago’ Thanks!

Motivation

What is the use case for this feature?

Identifying runs

Why is this use case valuable to support for MLflow users in general?

The point of using mlflow is to find previously logged experiment runs, also based on time

Why is this use case valuable to support for your project(s) or organization?

Why is it currently difficult to achieve this use case?

It is very inconvenient trying to identify the runs like this: first, you have to count the days, and second, the farther back, the less specific the references become: there can be hundreds of runs, say, 5 days ago - and they are all ‘5 days ago’ and thousands of runs 5 months ago and they are all just ‘5 months ago’

Details

No response

What component(s) does this bug affect?

• area/artifacts: Artifact stores and artifact logging
• area/build: Build and test infrastructure for MLflow
• area/docs: MLflow documentation pages
• area/examples: Example code
• area/model-registry: Model Registry service, APIs, and the fluent client calls for Model Registry
• area/models: MLmodel format, model serialization/deserialization, flavors
• area/recipes: Recipes, Recipe APIs, Recipe configs, Recipe Templates
• area/projects: MLproject format, project running backends
• area/scoring: MLflow Model server, model deployment tools, Spark UDFs
• area/server-infra: MLflow Tracking server backend
• area/tracking: Tracking Service, tracking client APIs, autologging

What interface(s) does this bug affect?

• area/uiux: Front-end, user experience, plotting, JavaScript, JavaScript dev server
• area/docker: Docker use across MLflow’s components, such as MLflow Projects and MLflow Models
• area/sqlalchemy: Use of SQLAlchemy in the Tracking Service or Model Registry
• area/windows: Windows support

What language(s) does this bug affect?

• language/r: R APIs and clients
• language/java: Java APIs and clients
• language/new: Proposals for new client languages

What integration(s) does this bug affect?

• integrations/azure: Azure and Azure ML integrations
• integrations/sagemaker: SageMaker integrations
• integrations/databricks: Databricks integrations

[harupy]

Unfortuantely, I don’t think we can swap the two. We could add a toggle switch in the toolbar above the table or perhaps in the column header. Added the help wanted label so someone in the community can contribute.

[mlflow-automation]

@BenWilson2 @dbczumar @harupy @WeichenXu123 Please assign a maintainer and start triaging this issue.