Visualizing Kibana saved object relationships & status

[gimmic]

Visualizing Kibana Saved Objects

Describe the feature:
We need better ways to visualize the existing known relationships between saved objects. Currently when you export a saved object you can decide to also export any dependencies. Visualizing this dependency in a connection mapping viz could actually be useful at an overall management and troubleshooting scale.

Describe a specific use case for the feature:
Working with larger scale elastic cluster(s), one can run into challenges managing Kibana saved objects. Mass exports/imports and general management of spaces where multiple users are creating objects means that you end up with a lot of 'cruft' in Saved Searches, Dashboards, Visualizations etc.

Specific Visualizations:
Visual Saved Object Connection mapping: A view of relationships between saved objects.
This would allow you to identify orphaned or unused saved objects. Overlaying some kind of use-frequency heat mapping could directly help identify orphaned and unused searches/viz/dashboards.

Stale saved objects: Data table or Heat Map indicating how often saved objects are used inside the space

Visualization of broken dependencies: A view showing 'red X' situations where underlying fields do not exist or other errors.
This could show dead ends where a specific saved object no longer has a dependency met. This could be a related saved object or an underlying field. In situations where this dead end occurs, a really fancy fix would be a selection window to update the link to an existing object. This would give you a visual way to both find and fix visualization errors.

I am finding these use cases as part of ongoing space management and ECS migration projects. Right now there is a lot of exported ndjson find/replace iterative fixups, and I don't see a reason this has to stay managed outside of Kibana. We should be able to fix and troubleshoot saved objects from inside Kibana.

Questions:
Is the relationship mapping of saved objects stored in a Kibana management index?
Is it possible to see the last time a Kibana saved object was loaded?
Might be possible to mock some of this up already..

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-core (Team:Core)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app-services (Team:AppServices)

[pgayvallet]

Visualization of broken dependencies

#88814 was merged recently, and will allow to see broken references from the 'relationship' flyout of the saved objects management section. Of course, it forces to manually check each individual object atm, so does not scale well, but it's a start.

Is the relationship mapping of saved objects stored in a Kibana management index?

The relation is represented by a list of id/type tuples in the references field of the parent document.

Now if the question was 'is the actual relational model stored as data', it is not, this is expressed programmatically (FK and such are not an existing concept in E, at least atm)

Is it possible to see the last time a Kibana saved object was loaded?

It is something that is planned, even if not prioritized yet. But atm, no. you can only see the last time the SO was modified

Also, FWIW, we are well aware of some of the limitation of our current relationship model, and discussions are currently open on how to improve it (such as #82064)

[Mauro-Rizzi]

+1 on this, considering how easy it is to create never again used visualizations we need better tools to clean up the backend.

I would propose letting us filter for orphan objects (aka objects with no parents) in the saved objects search bar to atleast simplify maintenance until this feature is implemented.

My saved objects store is up to 500 objects in a rather small deployment of which i'm sure 30% are no longer on use but I don't have time to go trough 500 results to check which is which.

[ppisljar]

Thank you for contributing to this issue, however, we are closing this issue due to inactivity as part of a backlog grooming effort. If you believe this feature/bug should still be considered, please reopen with a comment.

[Mauro-Rizzi]

Pinging @gimmic or @ppisljar to reopen this issue as I believe this is a must have.

[gimmic]

@Mauro-Rizzi Agreed.
We have 100+ pages of saved objects in a single space, with multiple spaces. I'm not sure how to reopen this(don't see an option) but I do think it is still valid.