Keeping up with Kibana: This week in Kibana for November 15th, 2019

By
Bill McConaghy

Platform

New APIs:

  • A new “chromeless” option is available to registered applications. (#49795 and #50060) This paves the way for UI applications such as login, logout, and status pages.

Fixes:

  • The Core notifications.toasts API now supports any UI framework (#49573). Helpers for React have also been added to the kibana_react utility plugin.
  • New Platform plugins can now be disabled by default. (#50286) This was a blocker for migrating alerting to the New Platform and Endgame’s new plugin development.

In Progress:

The team has also spent the last couple weeks identifying all the remaining work to get the New Platform to full feature parity with the legacy system. We will be using this to plan our roadmap through 7.7.

Stack Services

Alerting

 We continued working on the create alert UI. Focused on the alert condition section and the action selection.  We also worked on re-enabling the test suite after flaky failures (#50246).  We fixed an issue causing error messages in relation to rescheduling of tasks in Telemetry/Maps/Lens (#50232). Continued work on adding a `reschedule` API to Task Manager (#45152). Started investigating the work needed to migrate Task Manager to New Platform.

Kibana App (Visualizations, Sharing, Discover)

Elastic-Charts

We released a new version of elastic-charts (14.1.0) after fixing the typings for TS 3.7.

We merged a great new feature requested by various teams: add the ability to fit data of non-stacked line and area charts with a specified fit function (carry, look ahead,nearest, linear, average, zero, explicit). At the moment this works for ONLY non-stacked series. Stacked series requires a similar approach having to account for the fitted value of lower series. 

We also merged our first community PR by Pedro Luiz Cabral Salomon Prado, thank you to help us clean up our code!

Lens

We have been completing the last few checklist items for beta, especially writing documentation and content about Lens. We have also cleaned up our backlog and closed out issues that are completed. We have also reviewed work from the app arch team that affects our usage.

Also, we are currently planning future of Lens, and have started syncs with the Elasticsearch team to discuss our wishlist. We will be closely watching the telemetry and user feedback in the beta as we build this plan!

NP Migration

The NP migration is progressing well.  In the last two weeks the PRs shimming home and dev tools got merged. Currently we are working simultaneously on shimming Dashboard (in review), Visualize (almost done) and Discover (almost done). Migrating the tutorials API on the server is also currently in review with a PR to de-angularize the vis legend and making table vis independent of the global angular. All progress is also tracked on our detailed spreadsheet.

App Architecture

We continue to focus on the Kibana platform migration work. Notable items this week were:

On the Data Access Services front, we added support for setting the Elasticsearch [request preference] to the new search service.

Security

On the new platform front, we have submitted a PR to move the rest of the security plugin's API endpoints to the new platform. Additionally, we have submitted a PR to provide the current space using the new-platform route context.  We have a PR going through review which will fix the infinite redirect issue which users have seen when switching from using no base-path to a base-path. Additionally, we have a PR to implement an absolute session timeout which is also going through review.

Maps

The Maps and Observability Teams have been working together on a PoC to introduce Maps into the Uptime Monitoring service.  The Observability Team has used the Map Embeddable to introduce their custom GeoJSON map style to create a world view on Elastic Uptime.  It’s not available yet, but we wanted to show this example of the progress.

Canvas

Condensed Sidebar

By using compressed form styles in the sidebar, element settings become more discoverable as less inputs move off the screen.

To further simplify this work area, help text has been moved to icon tooltips, amd text copy (including callouts, titles, etc.) has been edited to be more concise.

Other small UX improvements were made along the way, particularly within the Data tab (selecting data sources). This includes not only improved form layouts, but re-ordered fields, new card designs, additional contextual help (e.g. link to ES SQL docs) and more.

Charts changes coming

One of these is flot (our current charting library in Kibana) - the other is Elastic Charts.

Guess which one is which?

Stay tuned...

Further reading

Follow along with Canvas closed PRs for the last two weeks.

Design

Consistent Help Links

We have been working on getting more consistent help links in Kibana (Github Issue) and after many iterations landed on a new layout.

EuiCard

We have also made progress on the EuiCard accessibility including the ability to add custom children

Dev Tools

We are cleaning up the interface with some CSS tweaks and updated styling 

Dashboard UI and visualization onboarding


Work ramped up on improving the time it takes to create your first visualization. This includes initial changes to the Dashboard UI that will lead to a tighter loop between it and other applications, such as Visualize and Lens.

Graph

Again, some improved onboarding work, this time with Graph and the getting started experience a key improvement to making Graph usable for all.

Upcoming Component - EuiAspectRatio

The EuiAspectRatio is getting closer to release as the documentation received attention this week.

EuiHeaderAlert

There were some recent updates to the EuiHeaderAlert component as well as it being added to our docs

Operations

We have been working in the feedback received for the log rotation feature which will continue next week.

A minor problem in the clean tasks for the dll during the build was fixed: we are now able to look for server dependencies into the new platform plugins.

Jenkins:

  • Shell scripts have labels now, instead of just "Shell Script" in pipeline steps in Jenkins
  • Flaky test suite runner code backported
  • git clone retries to account for Github flakiness

QA

Visual Test Automation 

  • Re-enabled visual testing on Kibana PRs
  • Research into Applitools 

General

  • Release testing 7.5.0
  • Release testing 6.8.5