[META] Updated Discover UX - Unified Data Exploration in OpenSearch Dashboards

[shanilpa]

Overview

The following Meta issue is an iteration on the UX in the following proposal: #5507

Discover is the central tool for data exploration in OpenSearch Dashboards, and as we look to evolve it into the unified data exploration proposal above we will take incremental steps to get there. The following Meta issue tracks those steps. It also has some iterations on the initial proposal.

Improved look and feel

Users expressed feedback asking for a more compressed UI and cleaner look and feel. Here is a reduced number of controls and chrome to give a more visually pleasing and functional interface.

• [Proposal] - Improve Discover Look and Feel #6067

Advanced data source selection

This is a proposal to improve data source selection by allowing users to have more control over the data they select, making it easier to create index patterns in Discover, and allowing users to select data from multiple OpenSearch clusters, federated data sources and any community contributed data sources in the future.

• [Proposal] - Advanced Data Selector #6068

Simplified selector

Improvements to the simplified data source selector that allows users to more quickly select recently selected data sources, and data connections. This selector can also be modified to select indexes, index patterns, federated data sources etc.

• [Proposal] - Improved data selector #6071
• [Proposal] - Naming for data sources #6070

Query Language Selection

Depending on support from selected data sources users are able to select query languages that they prefer to use to explore their selected data. The default is set in Advanced Settings by an admin, however based on a user’s selection we default to that query language in following sections.

• [Feature] Unified query language selection in Data Explorer #5504
• [Proposal] - Improved DQL Querying #6072
• [Proposal] - Improved PPL Querying #6074
• [Proposal] - SQL Querying #6075
• [Proposal] - Natural Language Querying #6076
• [Proposal] - Query assistance #6077

Data exploration functionality

Improved functionality to allow users to explore and discover insights about their time series data.

• [Proposal] - Expanding Events #6078
• [Proposal] - Field Insights #6079
• [Proposal] - Patterns  #6080

Save and open flows

Improved flows for opening saving queries, searches, and updating existing saved searches.

• [Proposal] - New, Open, Save, Share and Update Discover Searches and Queries #6085

Contextual acceleartion

• [Proposal] - Contextual acceleration #6086

For external data sources that have slow query performance, users are able to accelerate their data via skipping index, covering index and materialized views, directly from Discover to improve performance of searches.

Contextual data exploration

Allowing users to explore data anywhere in Dashboards via a light weight contextually available Discover

• [Proposal] - Contextual Data Exploration #6087

Multi-Query in Discover

Allowing users to leverage multiple queries in Discover for more robust exploration and analysis

• [Proposal] - Multi-Query in Discover #6088

Visualization builder in Discover

Allowing users to more quickly create visualizations from Discover explorations

• [Proposal] - Visualization builder in Discover #6089

Overlays in Discover

Allowing users to augment their explorations with additional information and context from other parts of the application

• [Proposal] - Overlays in Discover #6090

Contextual Dev Tools

Supporting advanced use cases by allowing dev tools in Discover and beyond

• [Proposal] - Contextual Dev Tools #6091