[Metrics UI] Metrics Threshold doesn't warn about redundant groupBy when creating/editing through the API

[Zacqary]

In #111891, we added this UI warning when the user tries to groupBy something that they're already filtering down to a single match:

Unfortunately, the user doesn't see this warning when they edit alerts through the API. If they're trying to bulk edit a large group of alerts, or create them programmatically, they might end up with a lot of unnecessarily grouped alerts which are prone to errors.

Possible solutions are to:

• Automatically remove the redundant groupBy fields, and send a warning in the response
• Throw an error and require the user to resend the query with the offending groupBy fields removed (or with a force flag?)

Any implementation of this should be sure to also implement the OR fix detailed in #116195

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/logs-metrics-ui (Team:logs-metrics-ui)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/obs-ux-infra_services-team (Team:obs-ux-infra_services)

[botelastic]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/obs-ux-management-team (Team:obs-ux-management)

[smith]

@elastic/obs-ux-management-team this came up as stale but it looks like it's for the alerting rule so I changed the team label.

[jasonrhodes]

@maryam-saeidi do you know if we still do this check in the UI? I think we should probably not do it at all, since adding "Group By" fields is a way to trigger various alerts as data storage scenarios, so a user may have reasons for keeping a group by in place even if it's "redundant" as this issue describes.

[maryam-saeidi]

I've tested locally, and I didn't see this check in the Metric threshold rule:

Checking the related PR, I see the code is there, but I am not sure why it is not working anymore. We also copied this logic to the custom threshold rule.

@jasonrhodes I agree with allowing users to add both group by field and filter for the same field (in this case, the value will be included in the instance id of the alert and can be used in the alert table), so shall we have a separate ticket for removing the related logic from both the custom threshold and metric threshold rules?

[jasonrhodes]

OK thanks, I vote to remove this code from all places (here, custom threshold.... anywhere else?)

We will create a new ticket to do this that references this one.

[maryam-saeidi]

Created #184712 for removing unused code.