advanced query option for building custom aggregations

[yehosef]

I would like to suggest an advanced query option where a user can put in a raw query and use kibana for visualizing it.

When you build a query, the data comes back in aggregations and sometimes nested aggregations depending on the complexity. But eventually all of that can be represented in a table which is shown with the request/response.

If I could take the columns of that table and define which I want to be the X-axis, which should be the Y axis, which for split chart, which for split bars, etc. I could build my own visualization and even change it (there are sooo many times that I have build a visualization using split chart with multiple filters and then I decide I want instead a split bars and I have to cut and paste the fields, which it's really a small internal change to tell the rendering what to do with the data)

The advantage of this approach is that it would allow people to do more sophisticated queries and aggregations without them needing to be implemented in the query builder. EG, we could also start using pipeline aggregations now, without needed to wait for them to be implemented in Kibana.

As I see it, the visualize tool in Kibana has 3 parts: the query builder, making/receiving/parsing the response, rendering the response. If we can just take out the query builder for certain queries, I think the data will be pretty easy to drop into the pipeline. What'll happen is that the aggregation names instead of being "1" or "2" will be "date" or "num_visits" and the user will need to specify which fields are the X/Y axis, split chart/split bar

[barryhatfield]

+1

especially for getting started with pipeline aggregations sooner

[yehosef]

note - this is possible in grafana. @rashidkpc you can look at how they (unintentionally) support it.

[AlexIoannides]

+1 maybe start by providing this for metric visualisations?

[mathewmeconry]

+1

[timroes]

I'll close this in favor of the more recent issues of a JSON query datasource and an expression datasource (which would also allow that, given that we have a esdsl function allowing specification of any query).