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Surface more information for diagnosing shard failures #5957

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spalger opened this issue Jan 21, 2016 · 3 comments · Fixed by #41649
Closed

Surface more information for diagnosing shard failures #5957

spalger opened this issue Jan 21, 2016 · 3 comments · Fixed by #41649
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enhancement New value added to drive a business result Feature:Search Querying infrastructure in Kibana

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@spalger
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spalger commented Jan 21, 2016

Just filed elastic/elasticsearch#16135 because we discoverd a way to cause requests to partially fail reliably, but the user is not told what the actual failures are.

When a response from elasticsearch includes a mixture of shard failures and successes the response is considered successful, but a warning is shown to the user. The warning simply states how many shards failed, but does not allow the user to see why they failed, and the warning is automatically hidden after a timeout.

image

Instead we should probably allow the user to click "more info", see the different causes for the errors, and prevent the warning from hiding if the user has interacted with it.

@spalger spalger added bug Fixes for quality problems that affect the customer experience P2 and removed P2 labels Jan 21, 2016
@epixa epixa removed the P2 label Apr 25, 2017
@cjcenizal
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Per @timroes in #20767 (comment):

One of the most annoying things with shard failures currently is, that you don't get any insights into the actual failures, and that's very often a painpoint in discuss questions, since users need to check the actual browser request, and dig through that JSON. In the long run we definitely should build this notification in a way, that you can get a list of actual errors from the individual charts.

Courier is currently responsible for surfacing this error. Because courier isn't coupled to any particular part of the UI, it has to surface it in a global way, e.g. through toasts or banners. However, this format isn't conducive to long-form content, like stack traces or error messages which require parsing and time to diagnose. I think we have two solutions:

  1. Make the consuming UI responsible for surfacing this error. This will remove responsibility for surfacing the error from Courier, and allow the consumer to present the error in a way that makes the most sense for the UI. However this will be labor-intensive and can result in duplicated effort if it turns out that there's a common format which works best for all UIs.

  2. Create a new global system for presenting these types of errors, similar to the inspector. It may even be possible to surface this content inside of the inspector, since its role is to aid diagnosis of problems and performance. I lean towards this option personally.

@cjcenizal cjcenizal added :Discovery enhancement New value added to drive a business result and removed bug Fixes for quality problems that affect the customer experience labels Jul 18, 2018
@cjcenizal cjcenizal changed the title Partial errors hide the problem Surface more information for diagnosing shard failures Jul 18, 2018
@cjcenizal
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cjcenizal commented Jul 18, 2018

#11178 contains steps to produce this error and valuable user feedback.

@cjcenizal
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cjcenizal commented Jul 18, 2018

From talking with @sherry-ger and @jaijhala, I understand that having access to the ES logs pertinent to the error would really help debugging. This would require the user to have the proper access privileges though.

@timroes timroes added Feature:Search Querying infrastructure in Kibana Team:Visualizations Visualization editors, elastic-charts and infrastructure and removed :Discovery labels Sep 16, 2018
@timroes timroes added :AppArch and removed Team:Visualizations Visualization editors, elastic-charts and infrastructure labels Mar 27, 2019
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Labels
enhancement New value added to drive a business result Feature:Search Querying infrastructure in Kibana
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