Common reasons code insights may not match search results

There are a few reasons why chart data series' most recent datapoint may show you a different number of match counts than the same search query run in Sourcegraph manually.

[For versions pre-3.40] Not including fork:no and archived:no in your insight query

Because code insights historical search defaults to fork:yes and archived:yes, but a Sourcegraph search via the web interface or CLI does not, it may be that your insight data series is including results from repositories that are excluded from a Sourcegraph search. Try running the same search again manually with fork:yes and archived:yes filters.

NOTE: 3.40+ version defaults to fork:no and archived:no, the same way the search UI does.

Manual search will not include unindexed repositories

All repositories in a historical search are unindexed, but a manual Sourcegraph search only includes indexed repositories. It's possible your manual searches are missing results from unindexed repositories.

To investigate this, one can compare the list of repositories in the manual search (use a select:repository filter) with the list of repositories in the insight series_points database table. To see why a repository may not be indexing, refer to this guide.

New matches created since the insight datapoint ran

Currently, a data series' most recent datapoint defaults to the end of the prior month. It's possible that in the time between when your insight ran and when you ran a manual search, new matches have been added to your codebase. To confirm this, you can run type:diff or type:commit searches using the after: filter, but note that those filters only support up to 10,000 repositories, so you may first need to limit your search repository set.

NOTE: Future releases of Code Insights may include an always-up-to-date present-time point.

Repository timeouts caused a datapoint to miss results

If your code insight is very large, it is possible that a few (<1% in 100+ manual tests over 26,000 repositories) repositories failed to return match counts due to timing out while searching. To check this, you can run the following GraphQL query in the Sourcegraph GraphQL API:

GRAPHQL
query debug {
  insightViews(id: "INSIGHT_ID") {
    nodes {
      dataSeries {
        label
        status {
          pendingJobs
          completedJobs
          failedJobs
        }
      }
    }
  }
  insightViewDebug(id: "INSIGHT_ID") {
    raw
  }
}

where INSIGHT_ID can be found in the "edit" page for the insight (selectable from the three-dot dropdown on the insight) after ...edit/. It will look like https://yourdomain.sourcegraph.com/insights/edit/INSIGHT_ID?dashboardId=all. The INSIGHT_ID can also be found in the url of the single insight view found by clicking on the title of the insight. The ID will be in the url, for example, https://sourcegraph.yourdomain.com/insights/insight/{INSIGHT_ID}

If there are failedJobs, there may be timeouts or similar issues affecting your insight. insightViewDebug was added in 4.2 to give you more raw information on your insight.