Kibana Actions implementation plan

[lizozom]

This issue tracks work of the Kibana Actions of the @elastic/kibana-app-arch team.

Very broadly, actions are executable functions, or a pipeline of functions that will allow enriching the Kibana workflows. Some possible examples are:

• Filtering (current default)
• Navigate \ drilldown
• Export to PDF, image, etc. - relies on new chart implementation
• Setup alert

Principles

• Actions are to be defined and configurable at the embeddable level, so they can be supported for visualizations, saved searches, maps and on Canvas and also so that a single visualization can have multiple actions defined in the context of different dashboards.
• There can be multiple actions defined per each event. In case of more than one available action for the event (i.e. filter and drilldown available), the user would be shown a contextual menu to choose the action to execute.

Implementation Plan

Phase 1: Initial Embeddable API Branch

• Introduce action and trigger saved objects and registries
• Move dashboard container code into a separate plugin
• Move embeddable API out of ui/public into a separate plugin
• Move dashboard panel chrome into common embeddable API
• Implement saved searches filter trigger using new action APIs
• Create a sample functional test plugin that uses the new APIs and introduces Hello World Embeddables and Actions.

Phase 2: Clean up Embeddable API Branch

• chore Clean up input vs output states. They shouldn't overlap unless an embeddable modifies an input and exports it as an output state.
• bug Fix "Add new visualization" functionality (not being added to dashboard)
• bug Convert Map embeddable to new API.
• bug Grabbing index patterns on dashboard for filter bar needs to be re-implemented.
• chore Make sure new CSV export panel action still works, convert if necessary to new APIs
• test Add tests that run against the sample functional test plugin.
  • test Ensure a missing embeddable or action is handled properly as this can happen with plugins installed, that are then uninstalled, but their data still exists on a dashboard for instance.
  • test Simple container example, test adding an embeddable renders.
• chore improve documentation.

Phase 3: Create initial PR

• Split apart only the necessary pieces of the Embeddable API branch to the bare minimum required for the first merge of the new APIs.

Phase 4: Introduce new functionality in secondary PRs

• Bubble up click and brush events on visualizations to embeddable layer
• Add Customize Flow feature from embeddable panel which adds actions to triggers
• Implement Custom URL Navigate action
• Implement navigate to object action
• Support template parameter injection in actions
• Add Customize time range feature from embeddable panel

Phase 5 & beyond

• Expression Action to allow chained pipeline
• Option to inherit state from previous dashboard (time frame, filters, navigation)
• Option to set static filters for drilldown (time frame, filters, navigation)
• Allow configuring drilldown behavior
• New action: Send to slack
• Action editor management page?
• [ ]Add new Navigate to App action
• Support chart events:
  • series data click (currently fires filterBucket event on supported visualization types. Will require adding support on other visualization types)
  • visualization click (currently does nothing)
• Support more chart events (direct navigation (default), new tab, new window)
  • hover
  • brush

Additional Resources

Drilldown \ navigate action ticket
Embeddables and Actions design doc
Living architecture doc - Actions
Use cases

Things to keep in mind \ consider:

• Read only users (permissions)

[fyodorr]

Looking forward to this change. This would help and open up a lot of new use cases for Kibana.

[ipushkarr]

Hey, Liza. I'm looking for bubble up click and brush events on visualizations to embedded layer. Do you have any updated when It will be available in Kibana ? Or can you give me path forward to implement the same ? My Parent application is Angular 8 and I have integrated Kibana for chart dashboard.