Solution dashboard guided experience

[AlonaNadler]

We are currently investing in making the creation and editing of dashboards easier with fewer steps. This effort which is called Time to Visualise has multiple goals.

In addition, we recently had a few conversations with the observability team. The observability solution provides turnkey solution UI. Most observability users will still want a way to go off route and create their own dashboard. Creating a dashboard is often challenging for them. Observability mentioned other observability tools that know the types of visualizations the users need and simplify the creation for observability users.
We discuss some common visualizations used by observability users and how can we make them even easier with fewer clicks and more intuitiveness that will provide guided dashboard creations.

At the same time, the Lens team is been having conversations with the Maps team around Lens and Maps integrations
The idea behind Lens and Maps integration was to allow users ways to discover Maps and their ability to visualize using maps in Kibana, even if they haven’t explicitly chosen the Maps applications and started a map from scratch. The team is concern that although it is a good goal, there are big technical challenges in adding Maps to Lens in the way we wanted.

Driven by the template idea, perhaps we can make a popular for observability option in the dashboard. popular for observability allows users to quickly add pre-configured popular visualizations and maps which are commonly used in the observability use case. That will allow users to create a custom dashboard for their observability needs without the need to create all these visualizations/maps in Lens. Users can still tweak and edit the pre-canned panels (either in Lens or in Maps) but that will get them to a good starting point.

I created a wireframe mainly to communicate the idea :

• Popular for observability opens a flyout with images (not based on real data mainly as a display to show users the type of panel)
• The fly out contain, commonly used visualizations, maps, and even pre-configured input controls
• Users can search based on their needs, for example, rate or traffic and get a relevant set of results related to their needs.
• On selection, the panel is added to their dashboard and running based on their data (might look very different from the image).on selection, users might need to select the index pattern/ data stream the panel will run based on
• Users can go and edit the visualizations/maps like any other panel (in Lens or Maps application) when editing they can completely change the panel, which will not be saved in the popular to observability and only takes effect in their dashboard.
• In the future companies can add to their “popular categories.

Pros:

• From a solution perspective, it would be good to have users easily add meaningful panels to their dashboard based on solution best practices.
• Pre canned panels can help bridge some best practices in visualizations, helping users choose the right charts and functions.
• Creating a meaningful dashboard in a few clicks
• Anyone can create a dashboard, helps users with domain expertise with no Kibana experience.
• Proving Maps suggestions in the right context that will help users "discover" Maps application and get meaningful Maps without the need to learn how to create these
• Provide a getting started dashboard that can e tweaked, following the principle that it is easier to tweak something than created that from an empty state

Cons:

• TBD how common these panels can be? Might be that companies doing observability very different
• Doing templates dashboard (full dashboard for a specific use case with the ability to apply to users data) for specific scenarios might be a better approach which is also probably easier to solve

Open questions:

• Are there enough meaningful pre-canned panels which can be helpful to users?
• Would users still need to choose an index pattern/ data stream? It might be something that can be detected automatically
• Currently, when installing beats dashboards users get hundreds of visualization very specific per the source. The need to manage hundreds of visualizations is occasionally overwhelming. Can we make the pre-configured panels a bit more generic to avoid having a content management challenge and frustrating experience for users browsing too many options?
• The guided dashboard takes the customize dashboard toward the solutions and provides a way to go custom without the hurdle. Is it a problem worth solving?
• Lens and Maps integration is not a trivial technical challenge, is this approach technically more feasible?
• Is this approach something that can help also the security solution?

@nehaduggal @cyrille-leclerc @rayafratkina @timroes @alexfrancoeur @thomasneirynck @jensallen @VijayDoshi @roncohen @tbragin @MikePaquette @majagrubic @ThomThomson @ryankeairns

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[roncohen]

thanks Alona! Definitely an interesting approach. I think it does make sense to have a set of "preferred" or "popular" visualizations that are handled specially in the UI.

Thinking ahead on package manager, it would be cool if packages can supply a "popular" visualization. Maybe if visualizations could be tagged with [popular-observability] or [popular-security] they would automatically show up in the flyout. That would mean anyone creating a package could put the canonical visualizaition for their package in the popular visualizations section.

pinging @cyrille-leclerc because you've brought up the discovery problem around visualizations that users run into today

[cyrille-leclerc]

I'll review asap. FYI @tbragin

[ThomThomson]

Closing this as the Portable Dashboards initiative means that the Observability team can manage these sorts of things in their own solution UI by manipulating the dashboard API