Kibana shouldn't necessarily force the status page when a plugin is red

[LeeDr]

I'm not sure why my 5.0.0-alpha3 integration-test currently shows an issue;

plugin:monitoring Elasticsearch is still initializing the Monitoring indices

But I don't think that should block me from using all the rest of Kibana.

I think it's reasonable to show the user the status page when they first open Kibana (or log in).

And I think it makes sense to show that status if I tried to use the Monitoring (Marvel) app when it's plugin status is Red.

But a problem with one plugin shouldn't completely block usage of all the rest of Kibana.

Maybe the issue here is that Monitoring is setting the whole cluster state red?

[epixa]

I think the core issue here isn't really a bug so much as an explicit design decision for Kibana as a whole. Which isn't to say that we couldn't change that design, of course.

Basically, Kibana will block on the status page when any plugin is red because it has no possible way of knowing the effect a "red" plugin would have on Kibana itself. Since we don't know what ill-effects a user might experience in that situation, the only safe option is to disable access to Kibana entirely.

For example, imagine if the security plugin in x-pack was failing in such a way that there was no actual security at all. If we were to allow access to Kibana even though the security plugin was correctly marked as "red", then we'd essentially be opening up your entire Elasticsearch cluster to anyone with access to Kibana.

I'd love to see a better experience around all of this if anyone has ideas, but it's going to be really hard to have a generic solution that works for all plugins other than what we have now.

[pickypg]

Perhaps plugins can be marked with a start_without setting, similar to how they specify their own version, and Kibana could simply ignore such plugins when deciding to stop or not.

Then, if a plugin does not provide it, it defaults to true so that an unknown experience is stopped. Or we could just require the setting must exist.

[pickypg]

My idea there goes hand-in-hand with #7328 (comment).

{
  "name" : "monitoring",
  "version" : "5.0.0-alpha4",
  "kibana" : {
    "version" : "5.0.0-alpha4",
    "required_plugin" : false
  }
}

where required_plugin is used by Kibana to determine if the plugin can be skipped (like start_without, but probably a better name).

[bohyun-e]

Based on the Slack conversation, we decided that the correct behavior would be for plugins to properly track their dependencies, so even Console wouldn't work if the main ES plugin goes red, but if the main ES plugin is green, Console should be available.

[bohyun-e]

We could also improve the message we get as shown in the below screenshot, to be more helpful.

[cjcenizal]

I think this relates to #6380

[LeeDr]

cc @dougnelas I think this is the issue you asked me about

[gmoskovicz]

This is a must-to-have. We should be able to run Kibana regardless of specific RED plugins.

[javadevmtl]

At the very least, the dev tools!

[aseppala]

+1

[JalehD]

This was a must have ages ago when it was filed, it's overdue now.