[APM] Visualisation filter is not consistently behaving

[philippkahr]

Describe the feature:

When you are on the APM page and deselect the HTTP status codes, the transaction list should automatically filter accordingly.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/apm-ui (Team:apm)

[philippkahr]

I do not know if it is just me, but it feels weird to deselect the stuff you do not want to see. I think if you select something it should be positive.

[dgieselaar]

@philippkahr This is where contextual filters are supposed to come in. They are displayed on the left side of the screen. The specific filter in this case would be "transaction result". Not sure if you noticed these or if you mean that (de)selecting a chart legend item should filter the transaction list as well?

[philippkahr]

Hi @dgieselaar

I know about the conceptual filter :). It just feels weird that the visualisation in APM is different than anywhere in Kibana. If you hit any legend on a visualisation you will always be prompted with an” include, exclude, change colour” section. I think for usability and consistency that should be here the same case.

[dgieselaar]

@philippkahr I think that's a fair point. In general, we strive for consistency, but in some cases we deviate from other Kibana implementations because we think it provides a better experience in the context of APM. I'm not sure what the context is of this specific decision, but I can bring it up in one of our meetings.

Would you then say that this issue is a request for the legends in APM to behave similarly to other charts/apps in Kibana?

The original description mentioned that:

the transaction list should automatically filter accordingly.

Do you have an example of a Kibana app that does something like this, or is this something that you'd like to see in any case?

[philippkahr]

@dgieselaar thanks for looking into this!

Well, about my title. since this shifted more to a consistency issue I think it is fair to say, that when using any kibana dashboard and use the filter function from a visualisation, it is applied to the entire dashboard. It is usually added as a filter under the search bar.

[formgeist]

@philippkahr Hi Phillipp - just wanted to chime in on the design. We're planning on doing some enhancements to our UI filters sidebar design that enables us showing transaction.result values in the filters so you will be able to choose a value and it will filter the transactions list. I'd prefer this over using a chart legend to handle this scenario, since that legend is meant to change the data you see in the chart, not everywhere else. I hope that will support your use case a little more than currently.

[philippkahr]

Hi @formgeist

I looked into your issue. That seems fine to me. It just felt weird that using a legend on a visualization did not trigger a "systemwide" filter.

Just one more thing was it intentional to have a "deselect the stuff you do not want to see" in the visualization legend. If I just want to see HTTP 400 status codes, I would have to deselect everything from the legend except HTTP 400, it feels kinda weird. Could you implement the same handling every else visualization in Kibana has?

[formgeist]

Just one more thing was it intentional to have a "deselect the stuff you do not want to see" in the visualization legend. If I just want to see HTTP 400 status codes, I would have to deselect everything from the legend except HTTP 400, it feels kinda weird. Could you implement the same handling every else visualization in Kibana has?

We're not likely to change the behavior of the chart legends anytime soon, as we already have an option in this case to select the status code you want to filter by in the left sidebar. The legend show/hide functionality was primarily implemented because in some cases the 2xx status code would make the other lines impossible to read.