Disable Refresh while not in focus

[draco2003]

As the number of users that have one or more kibana tabs running in the background increases the load on the ES cluster increases as well with no real benefit.

If would be great to have the option to disable refreshing of data when the browser tab is not in focus.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Guide/User_experience/Using_the_Page_Visibility_API

[rashidkpc]

Auto refresh is not currently supported in kibana 4, feel free to add comments to this ticket so we keep them in mind when we implement it: #1845

[srijan55]

SInce #1845 is now closed. Adding +1 to this request.

[LucaWintergerst]

Any chance that we can consider this for 6.x as we have auto refresh back in Kibana 5.x?

[stacey-gammon]

Related: #14750

[kcm]

Have a few requests from customers to disable auto-refresh entirely, either Kibana-wide or per-Space. In their use case, analysts will sometimes not realize it's enabled, and leave an expensive query needlessly auto-refreshing even when in focus.

[ThomThomson]

Giving this one impact low, as the auto-refresh settings can be easily turned on and off on a per-dashboard basis.

[draco2003]

While I don't disagree with the impact low, It is much more from the infrastructure/load perspective and less around the user perspective.
We want dashboards to refresh when individuals are observing them, but it's a waste of resources if they are refreshing in a background tab.

[thomasneirynck]

I would agree with @draco2003 here.

The problem is less on the consumption on the dashboard-end/single user experience, but the overall impact on the system.

e.g. Consider an org where each user has a dashboard open -> this would create continuous strain on Elasticsearch, degrading the experience for all users.

This sits on the edge of enhancement/bug imho.

This is also not solely a Dashboard issue. Any app using the unified search bar has this issue. But it is most pressing for Dashboard due to the large number of queries a single Dashboard can issue.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-visualizations (Team:Visualizations)

[ThomThomson]

Adding large LOE to this because we'll need to take into account a setting to turn this capability off - it could get in the way of using Kibana as an unattended kiosk, and we'll also need to make sure that the page refreshes immediately on focus if the appropriate time has elapsed.

It's potentially between a medium and a large, so we could re-assess in the future if something changes.

[thomasneirynck]

a setting to turn this capability off

@ThomThomson would this not depend mostly on the particulars of the visibility-change event https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/visibilitychange_event . e.g. a kiosk-mode window should still be visible, even when not in focus (?)

we'll also need to make sure that the page refreshes immediately on focus if the appropriate time has elapsed

++

[ThomThomson]

In my cursory research, I was looking into focus - but it seems like the visibility change event you suggest is more likely the correct event to rely on. We'll need to do some more research to determine if that works correctly in a variety of setups - and depending on how confident we are, we could do away with the advanced setting.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/appex-sharedux (Team:SharedUX)

[petrklapka]

Adding this to SharedUX board. Tim asked if we could cover this. Hard to say right now, we're pretty booked fro the quarter already, but we'll keep it on the board and if we wrap something early, we can take a look.

[draco2003]

FYI, with Chrome's memory saver disabling inactive tabs this is a lower priority for us now

[petrklapka]

@ThomThomson - Just curious, why did this 10 year old issue become hot?

[ThomThomson]

@petrklapka I believe there's been some interest from Product due to a recent client request. @thomasneirynck CC

[vadimkibana]

I know of use cases where a dashboard is put on a large screen or a TV for 24/7 display of some data. I believe those users would want their data to be refreshed even if the page is not focused. Would we consider those use case? Maybe if dashboard is in a full screen mode, the blur of a tab would not stop refreshing? Or some more explicit mechanism?

[stratoula]

This is a valid point @vadimkibana. Do we know how this https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/visibilitychange_event will behave in these cases? Otherwise we might need a setting or something

[Dosant]

Do we know how this https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/visibilitychange_event will behave in these cases?

I think this should work for the 2nd screen use case and this is the way to implement this (as @ThomThomson and @thomasneirynck already mentioned above)

I can give it a shot and we can play with it.

What is good, is that a lot of places already rely on the timefiler service for autorefresh, so we only need to update one place and everybody who uses the timefilter service for autorefresh should get the improvement automatically