[Infra UI] Waffle map doesn't scale well to show many nodes in groupings

[makwarth]

Problem

When displaying many nodes in groupings, the waffle map doesn't scale well, and requires a lot of scrolling.

Some quick potential solutions

• Smaller node boxes
• Hide some nodes per group
• If too many groups, require user to choose group(s) to view before rendering all

Problem example

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/infrastructure-ui

[roncohen]

seems to me like a combination of smaller boxes + a denser display of the groups (less margin between groups) be a solution. When there's no text in the boxes, they could probably be really small

[makwarth]

Yeah, though one issue is that the groups need to be wide enough to show the actual group name. At least in this layout

[simianhacker]

I had a bunch of alternative layouts, we finally settled on this one but it sounds like we could probably benefit from exploring more ideas.

[makwarth]

I can imagine. It's a tricky problem. Even better filtering could be a good start. E.g. dropdown that lets you multi-select nodes/namespaces you'd like to see.

[mikehowey1]

Maybe allow users to save and create their own groups based on Namespace, Node, and\or Podname contains search.

[skh]

Some more ideas @weltenwort and I had in a discussion:

• have a zoom slider somewhere on the page that changes both the size of the inner squares in all groups and the group boxes so the user can choose between a bird's eye view with no readable metrics and a zoomed-in view where they need to scroll a lot
• have different sizes of inner squares depending of how many items are in a group, i.e. a group with 1000 items which are rendered as squares of 5x5 pixels could sit next to a group with very few items large enough to show node ids and metrics
• have a hard limit on the size of the group boxes and show scroll bars for each of them when not all items fit

[simianhacker]

I think a short term fix would be to try and limit the columns to 4 so that we don't get as much vertical stacking. The original algo would try to find a reasonable size for the square and then set the row count to something that would produce a square. Finally it would zoom the entire layout to fit. The downfall of that approach was that the zooming on a large cardinality result became unreadable.

[simianhacker]

This has been fixed on 6.7 and 7.0.