[Synthetics] Exploratory View visualizations broken in pending state

[dominiqueclarke]

Kibana version: 8.7.0

Description of the problem including expected versus actual behavior:

When configuring Synthetics, exploratory view embeddables appear to be broken when creating a monitor for the very first time, particularly if your first monitor is a browser monitor.

There are visualizations broken across Overview, Monitor Details and Management pages.

The errors are resolved after the first full monitor execution and after a hard refresh of the page.

The snapshot was on https://github.com/elastic/kibana/commits/3868eb98a3c2a911da9f4e7daa029d9d8ccdfdc8

Steps to reproduce:

1. elastic-package stack up --verison 8.7.0 -v
2. log in to https://localhost:5601 with elastic changeme
3. Create a private location (agents and agent policies will already be configured)
4. Run a browser monitor against that private location
5. Observe the broken experience throughout Overview and Monitor Details

Errors in browser console (if relevant): There seems to be a lot of io-ts errors related to monitor duration, for example

synthetics.chunk.3.js:3 API /internal/synthetics/overview_status is not returning expected response, Invalid value "719998" supplied to "downConfigs,171ef255-d25c-46be-a149-92618b5fa688-A private location,ping,state,duration_ms",Invalid value "858910" supplied to "downConfigs,b123651d-cf19-44d9-99ee-1f2f5fc0ccda-A private location,ping,state,duration_ms" for response 

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/uptime (Team:uptime)

[drewdaemon]

@dominiqueclarke was nice enough to walk me through this on both 8.7 and 8.6.

It looks like these errors are displayed on both versions before data is available (e.g. before the first run of a newly-created browser monitor).

The way these errors are shown did change in 8.7 (actually in the hopes of improving the situation). However, the 8.7 changes to Lens don't appear to have adversely affected this particular scenario.

Let me know if I missed anything!

Screenshots from 8.6

[dominiqueclarke]

@paulb-elastic We've determined this bug is not quite as critical as previously thought, but does present a broken onboarding experience. Here's our observations.

1. This bug appears when heartbeat data is still pending for the first time (first ever created monitor)
2. This bug appears both on-prem and in cloud. In particular, if your first monitor is a browser monitor you're more likely to see this experience because browser monitors take longer to execute... and our getting started experience is oriented around browser monitors.
3. In particular, you'll notice on the overview page that error is field state.id not found. This is because not every heartbeat document contains the state field, only the summary document. An ad hoc data view is created based on the data that is currently present, and since it doesn't find the state.id field it encounters this error. So while a browser monitor is in progress for the first time, this view would occur.
4. This view persists until a hard refresh of the page
5. In 8.8 we'll be doing away with the current monitor details pending experience in favor of a full page "warning" state that informs the user of the pending status. Visualizations on the monitor details page won't be shown until a complete execution of the monitor. This will resolve the issues seen on the monitor details page, but the issue will still persist on Overview without further fixes.

[paulb-elastic]

Thank you both for looking into this in detail.

I think this seems like an edge case in 8.7 and will be an improved implementation in 8.8, so closing