Consistent, global color configuration for query and field values

[tbragin]

Two main options exist for configuring color of a series today (in Kibana 4.4):

(1) Global setting in Advanced Settings which associates a particular string in the legend value (e.g. "error") with a color, introduced in Kibana 4.2.

(2) Per-chart color picker that works by clicking on a legend, introduced in Kibana 4.4. This configures a color for a legend value of a specific visualization.

However, there are a couple of notable limitations (see below).

Limitation 1. Legends are used inconsistently as far as association with colors go. For instance, pie chart Terms breakdown shows values in the legend, but not the bar chart. You can get the values to show up in the legend by doing a second Terms breakdown, but that's sort of a hack.

Limitation 2. In some cases, e.g. with Filters Agg that includes a star query, that trick doesn't work.

Proposal is to provide a consistent, non-hacky way (via Advanced Settings?) to associate a value either in the legend or in the axis label with a color. Ideally, there'd be a way to refer to an exact value or just a substring.

Keywords: color directory, color map

[pemontto]

👍 I currently use the second terms agg hack a lot

[nreese]

The Maps application is also in need of a way to define colors for field values - #32202.

What about doing this at the index-pattern level for the field? Field formatters already exist for the purpose of transforming the field value text before display. What about adding a new type of formatter to a field, called a Classifier. The Classifier would convert the value into a class - which could be a color. Then users could define how to classify values for a field and have a unified color palette across Kibana.

@thomasneirynck @timroes @Bargs @lukasolson thoughts?

[timroes]

I am a bit skeptical about putting that into index patterns right now. We have seen that very often users don't want to handle that kind of formatting on a per index basis but different on a per visualization level (e.g. see #16821). So our idea was in general to move formatting more towards the actual visualization and trying to get more away from field formatters in the future.

Also we would like to go more in a direction where we have customizable color palettes (#17764). I am wondering if those "color palettes" might be a better place to actually allow "static mapping" between values (or value ranges) and colors.

[nreese]

We have seen that very often users don't want to handle that kind of formatting on a per index basis but different on a per visualization level

I would argue that most users want consistent coloring across all visualizations. It is very hard to track values across charts if their color changes from chart to chart and it is very tedious to configure the colors for each chart.

Allowing users to override the defaults from the index-pattern makes sense but you still need a way to consistently display data across saved objects without a lot of manual work

[thomasneirynck]

I'm in agreement with @nreese .

We need a way for it to be consistent across visualizations. Index-patterns seem an appropriate place to put this (as we are already doing this with all the other formatters).

Of course, visualizations/maps/... can provide a way for users to override this. This would be the intent in the Maps-app as well.

• users could select to use the color of the formatter (if they want consistency)
• users could also manually define the color for a given class of features

But the ability to reuse a classifier across multiple maps, across multiple visualizations would be really powerful.