Trace Elasticsearch query to the origin in Kibanaedit

Sometimes the Elasticsearch server might be slowed down by the execution of an expensive query. Such queries are logged to Elasticsearch’s search slow log file. But there is a problem: it’s impossible to say what triggered a slow search request—a Kibana instance or a user accessing an Elasticsearch endpoint directly. To simplify the investigation of such cases, the search slow log file includes the x-opaque-id header, which might provide additional information about a request if it originated from Kibana.

At the moment, Kibana can only highlight cases where a slow query originated from a Kibana visualization, Lens, Discover, Maps, or Alerting.

For example, if a request to Elasticsearch was initiated by a Vega visualization on a dashboard, you will see the following in the slow logs:

"source": { "id": "c89d1ab3-b4a7-4920-a64a-22a910a413b0;kibana:application:dashboard:edf84fe0-e1a0-11e7-b6d5-4dc382ef7f5b;visualization:Vega:cb099a20-ea66-11eb-9425-113343a037e3" }

Take a closer look at the format of the string. The id value starts with c89d1ab3-b4a7-4920-a64a-22a910a413b0, which is a unique identifier of a request set by the Kibana server. The part after the kibana prefix indicates that the request was triggered by Dashboard with id edf84fe0-e1a0-11e7-b6d5-4dc382ef7f5b and Vega visualization with id cb099a20-ea66-11eb-9425-113343a037e3.

If the provided information is not enough to identify a visualization to adjust its parameters, you can configure Kibana logs to provide a human-readable description and a link to a source of the request:

logging:
  loggers:
    - name: execution_context
      level: debug
      appenders: [console]

Now, you can see the request to Elasticsearch has been initiated by the [Logs] Unique Visitor Heatmap visualization embedded in the [Logs] Web Traffic dashboard. You can navigate to the provided URL to change some parameters of the visualization.

[DEBUG][execution_context] stored the execution context: {
  "type": "application",
  "name": "dashboard",
  "id": "edf84fe0-e1a0-11e7-b6d5-4dc382ef7f5b",
  "description": "[Logs] Web Traffic","url":"/view/edf84fe0-e1a0-11e7-b6d5-4dc382ef7f5b"
  "child": {
    "type": "visualization",
    "name": "Vega",
    "id": "cb099a20-ea66-11eb-9425-113343a037e3",
    "description": "[Logs] Unique Visitor Heatmap",
    "url": "/app/visualize#/edit/cb099a20-ea66-11eb-9425-113343a037e3"
  },
}