[Infra UI] Link from Metrics Explorer to visualize requires an index pattern to be present

[weltenwort]

Kibana version: 20c9afe

Original install method (e.g. download page, yum, from source, etc.): source

Describe the bug:
When following the link from a Metrics Explorer panel to visualize without any index pattern being defined in the currently active space, the user is redirected to the index pattern creation screen.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Ingest metricbeat data with the system.cpu metricset enabled.
2. Navigate to the metrics explorer and set the following criteria:
   • metric: system.cpu.total.pct
   • group by: host.name
3. Follow the "Open in visualize" link.
4. Observe that the user is redirected to the index pattern creation screen.

Expected behavior:
The link loads TSVB as expected.

Screenshots:

Additional Context:
Creating any index pattern solves that problem, even if it is not related to the visualization at all.

Proposed Fix:
Auto-create index pattern for metricbeat-* when the infra UI loads, if it doesn't already exist, similar to how APM does this already. See comment: #39115 (comment)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/infra-logs-ui

[jasonrhodes]

After looking into this a bit, it seems as though having at least one Kibana index pattern is a hard requirement for discover and visualize, even though TSVB does not use Kibana index patterns.

We have two options:

1. Leave this as-is and live with the link interception, once a user has created an index pattern the visualize links will work (the experience is confusing, though ... but if they use APM, for instance, an index pattern will already have been auto-created for them)
2. Do a query for index patterns and if a user has none, hide the "visualize" links in the Metrics Explorer. This is probably cleaner but requires extra network trips and blocks links for a (small?) number of users who have no index patterns.

@tbragin @roncohen @elastic/infra-logs-ui does anyone have thoughts on these two options?

[jasonrhodes]

I guess we also have a third option to auto-create an index pattern when you visit the infra app, the way that APM does when you visit APM...

[tbragin]

@jasonrhodes Since it's so easy for the user to accidentally skip the "setup" step and end up with a fully working Infrastructure UI, but no metricbeat-* index pattern, I'd be interested in seeing similar behavior for what we do in the APM UI, and automatically create the metricbeat-* index pattern, if it's absent, but metricbeat indices are present.

[jasonrhodes]

@tbragin yeah that sounds easiest. Here's how APM does it:

• There is an HTTP endpoint that does this: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/x-pack/legacy/plugins/apm/server/lib/index_pattern/index.ts
• In the APM UI they call that endpoint once per session (using memoize): https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/x-pack/legacy/plugins/apm/public/services/rest/savedObjects.ts

I think we could probably do something similar in the metrics explorer page on load.

[jasonrhodes]

After looking into this more, we can't do exactly what APM does because APM's set up instructions are written in JS and share the config with their back-end, so they can both create the same index pattern whether the user does it in the set up phase or Kibana auto-creates it. Beats has a separate flow when a user runs metricbeat setup, seen here: https://github.com/elastic/beats/blob/master/libbeat/cmd/export/index_pattern.go#L31-L52

Keeping that creation process in sync will be tricky. For now we will leave this experience as-is.

[jasonrhodes]

Closing this for now while we discuss what to do in the discussion issue.