[APM] Confusing agent onboarding UX after adding the integration

[matschaffer]

Kibana version

8.0 branch - d13a86b

APM Server version (if applicable)

8.0 branch - ccd1ea7a9

Elasticsearch version (if applicable)

8.0 branch - 655669b64e6

Steps to Reproduce

Launch ES, kibana, and apm-server (all source)

Browse to kibana APM UI,

Click the "Add the APM integration" button, proceed through the setup flow.

Navigate back to the APM services pages

Expected Behavior

See some sort of APM UI that gives me information about what ELASTIC_APM_SECRET_TOKEN or server url to export.

This information is available on http://kibana.127.0.0.1.ip.es.io:5601/app/home#/tutorial/apm which I pass by during the flow, but it's pretty far down the page. On my 15" MBP screen in chrome with bookmarks shown, the tab text just barely shows up.

Actual Behavior

Get the "Add the APM integration" prompt again, unclear on how to "continue" my apm agent setup.

Recording of attempting to add the APM integration from the apm services page

[elasticmachine]

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

[matschaffer]

The network tab shows two requests getting canceled that seem like they might be important. Nothing shown in error console.

[matschaffer]

I tried clearing application data in chrome and doing the integration add again, no change in behavior.

[matschaffer]

I ran into this hoping to validate elastic/apm-server#7139

I'll try it again from empty and see if there's any change. I did start apm-server once before I added the integration (forgot the correct ordering), so maybe that caused something in the data to be weird?

[matschaffer]

I brought up a fresh stack to test this again and tried the more "guided" flow and ran into a different error: [email protected] not found

[matschaffer]

If I navigate directly to APM (what I was doing in my initial testing) I don't hit the [email protected] not found error, and the integration version shows 8.0.0-rc1 so I guess it might be some disagreement in package version between the two flows?

[matschaffer]

I have my local kibana reporting APM traces to a cloud instance and found this error stack.

The integration is installed:

And apm-server is running:

Indeed the apm-* pattern has no indices

But it's unclear what I'm supposed to do to get it created.

[axw]

But it's unclear what I'm supposed to do to get it created.

You shouldn't need apm-* indices, the UI continues to query them for backwards compatibility with older versions of apm-server. If lack of apm-* indices causes a fatal error then that's just a bug.

[axw]

I tested locally with apm-integration-testing, using 8.0.0-rc2 BC3, modifying kibana config to not preinstall the integration and to use production rather than snapshot EPR.

After installing the integration, I also see the "Add the APM integration" prompt when navigating to the APM UI (specifically, the services list). I see the same behaviour when starting a new deployment in ESS.

I think this is just a matter of confusing onboarding UX?

[matschaffer]

Ahh... I think this is the sort of thing I was looking for but it's below the fold so I just clicked past it.

Okay, we can just call this confusing UX then. Feel free to close or whatever handling you think is appropriate. Thanks @axw !

[formgeist]

@matschaffer Thanks for testing through this and letting us know about your experience. I want to say that we understand there are improvements to be made for making the flow much smoother. We do have an older issue around for collapsing the APM server instructions when one is running or you're using the APM integration successfully, so we just show the agents instructions.

Re: the issue with not having any data show up and the roadblock "install APM integration" screen, I ran into the similar issue on an older build but couldn't reproduce. #121164

Just want to make sure we don't have some UI bug where the indices aren't created or correctly set up that would cause this to block the APM app.

[simitt]

@matschaffer thanks for reporting this. Regarding the issue in trying to install 8.0.0-dev4 package: this package was only released to staging, and it won't be available in production. Unfortunately the 8.0.0-rc2 build hasn't been updated to pull the 8.0.0 package, so the migration is kind of broken there. The apm package 8.0.0 has now been released to production, and a fix has been merged to Kibana to pull the 8.0.0 package.

[matschaffer]

@formgeist I can give it another try if you'd like I have all the shas noted in the test plan - I actually didn't get a "Services" list but I presumed this was due to me using the "dummy" tester program from elastic/apm-server#7139

[formgeist]

@formgeist I can give it another try if you'd like I have all the shas noted in the test plan - I actually didn't get a "Services" list but I presumed this was due to me using the "dummy" tester program from elastic/apm-server#7139

I think we'll continue to test in APM and with the GA build coming out soon, I think we will go through the plan again. Thanks for offering to support 👍