Kibana Home enhancements for new beta ingestion options

[alexfrancoeur]

In 6.5, there are two new ingestion options being introduced as beta or experimental. We'd like to promote both of these on the Kibana homepage.

The first is a new serverless beat to collect information from AWS Lambda. There is an open issue for a new Add Data tutorial that will be introduced under the All tab. Since this new type of beat is fairly generic and doesn't necessarily fall under any of the use cases in the homepage today, we'd like to explore options for showcasing this on the homepage for 6.5. For more information on the tutorial itself, check out #23708. Ideally, we would only advertise this type of beat on the homepage if the instance is running on cloud and more particularly (bonus points), if it's run on AWS. Though worst case scenario, this is persisted in every view for Kibana Home.

Separately, the ML team is putting together an experimental feature that will allow users to upload and ingest CSV, JSON and txt files. The initial PR for this functionality is in #23708 and the meta issue is #21916. The ML team is still iterating through design but we are apparently on track for a 6.5 deliverable. This type of feature is quite a longstanding ask from the community and is also noteworthy enough to have on the homepage.

In reality, the home page is getting overcrowded and is overdue for a redesign. While I think we can and should tackle this soon (possibly for 7.0 and K7 redesign), we're really looking for a short term solution here. One of our initial thoughts was to add additional text columns (or rows) to the section below the add data section.

@snide @ryankeairns @cchaos @formgeist what do you think? Is there any way we can get creative here for 6.5 and tackle a larger redesign in the near future?

cc: @nreese @stacey-gammon @gchaps @acchen97 @uric @AlonaNadler @grabowskit @sophiec20 @tbragin

[snide]

For anyone following this. We'll be doing some in person sessions around the homepage at EAH. Alex or I can post summaries from it after.

[alexfrancoeur]

@snide @ryankeairns @cchaos given the homepage / nav discussions to address this view in the future, is there anything we can do to advertise two new experimental ways to ingest data?

[ryankeairns]

@alexfrancoeur are you asking for ways we can do that within the new design we discussed or ways to do that in the meantime within the current home page?

[snide]

What are the two new ways and where do they point to?

From the discussion last week, if you want them added we can give you some concepts fairly quickly, but ultimately they'll likely be lost in the overload of choice on this page.

[snide]

I guess I meant more... where do these new links point to (is it within kibana?) and how do you want them framed.

[alexfrancoeur]

Sorry @snide @ryankeairns, I didn't provide enough detail above. @acchen97 and @grabowskit may be able to help with the wording here.

Functionbeat
Functionbeat enables the core functionality of Beats to be deployed and run on serverless infrastructure to collect data from first-class Cloud services

Functionbeat will be listed under All in the Add Data UI and does not really fit under any of the other tabs other than that. So it makes most sense to have a direct link in the home page if we plan to advertise it. This link will link directly to the tutorial in a similar fashion as APM.

Upload a file
Have a file you'd like to upload to Kibana? Upload a JSON, CSV or text file to immediately start using in Kibana

This is the new "Data Visualization for files" feature that the ML team has built (and we're all drooling over). It would link directly to the UI today but in the future, I would see this evolving into an add data wizard that will not only upload a file but help get you up and running with an ingestion pipeline.

Both of these features are experimental in 6.5. We'd really like to advertise them on the homepage. Given that they are experimental, I'm hesitant to take up a lot of real estate. Even though the upload a file feature is a heavily requested feature, in its first phase I imagine we'll run into some issues.

My initial thoughts were to add two new sections underneath the sample data and index pattern links. I know there were some discussions around conditionally showing the functionbeat on the homepage but given the timeframe, I don't think that will be possible. Open to a number of ideas here but given that FF is next Tuesday, I'd really like to explore what can be done for 6.5 and how we can get this in there.

[ryankeairns]

@alexfrancoeur I'm not familiar with the code, but I'll take a swing at adding them below the sample data/index pattern links and see how far I can get. Given the short timeframe and that we're talking about a larger home page redesign, I think it makes sense to keep this simple as you suggested.

[ryankeairns]

@alexfrancoeur et al, here is a first pass... the functionbeat text is rather long (and seemingly more difficult to shorten), so I've opted for moving it out of the panel. When inside the panel, it seems to obscure the other items at the bottom of that panel (Sample Data, Your Data, etc.). Also, not sure about the icon alongside functionbeat... makes it feel like an ad but perhaps that is appropriate in this case(?).

I've also massaged the words a bit here to keep things feeling similar in message and size:

Let me know what you think!

[ryankeairns]

Started a PR for this over here #24226

Outstanding questions:

• Keep the Functionbeat text?
• If so, keep it between panels or add to bottom of Add Data to Kiana panel?
• Need copy review from @gchaps
• The link under 'Upload data from file' currently goes nowhere (s/b /app/ml#/datavisualizer)
• Add in [Rollups] Add Rollups link to Kibana Home #24029

[alexfrancoeur]

@acchen97 @uric functionbeat is really throwing me off here, it does seem randomly placed. Given that FF for 6.5 is on Tuesday, I'm skeptical that we'll be able to introduce the conditional element to only show in cloud environments where its applicable. If we were unable to introduce this functionality, does it make sense to persist in the homepage? For 6.5, would we be alright with having a module in the add data UI and then showcasing more with a redesign of the homepage? Potentially in the 6.x timeframe.

[alexfrancoeur]

@ryankeairns I spoke to @acchen97 and given where they are today, I think we can remove the functionbeat link / text and revisit in 6.6

@grabowskit @sophiec20 for the upload a file link, let us know what the link is whenever you have a chance. There is already an open PR here. I'd recommend that in the deep link / landing page we use we have a header, experimental label, detailed description (maybe involve @gchaps) and upload component. That way when a user clicks into the UI from the home page, they know exactly where they are and what they should be doing next.