Simplify method for building visualizations in Kibana4

[PhaedrusTheGreek]

In Kibana3, the process of creating widgets was more intuitive. Is there any way to bridge the gap between the extra functionality of Kibana4 with Elasticsearch Aggregations, and the older (but easier to understand) Kibana3 with Elasticsearch Facets?

Perhaps some sort of visualization creation wizard would assist in asking the customer what questions they want answered?

[blysik]

Agreed. I still continue to struggle with Kibana4.

[ESamir]

+1

[pythianali]

The biggest thing for us is that many people get into elasticsearch with the ELK stack. What they do is invest lots of time with the visualization and dashboards in kibana which can be used to get traction at the executive levels of the organization. Many times these dashboards are used to get the attention the buy in for the use of the product.

Then what happens is because you guys release things so quickly, users need to upgrade. Then kibana3 turned into kibana4 and they are completely independent of one another. So not only do you need to completely relearn how kibana4 works but there isn't a migration path for your existing kibana3 dashboards. I know users with 50-100 complex dashboards in use so the effort to manually migrate those is substantial.

Additionally as kibana4 doesn't work the same way as 3, many people have huge issues learning how to recreate the same dashboards that they had before. Simple things like changing colors of the data series (I want errors to be red) are a huge frustration. The data bucket/widget creation is also very confusing and is far to technically oriented for a gui in my opinion.

Whats worse is that with ES 2.0, kibana3 is no longer offered. So that means that users who are not able to migrate to kibana4 for whatever reason are stuck until they are able to do so. Will a support contract cover dashboard migration in this case? I think not.

In my opinion more effort needs to be made in ensuring that kibana evolution is smoother as it has the most non technical users and visibility out of all the components in the stack. The more 'normal' users that can be experts at kibana and its functionality, the better off the entire project will be

[chakrayadavalli]

+1 To add to the enhancement request, it would be great to have a means to switch between different types of visualizations. Say I start off with creating a line chart and half way thru, I might feel that it is better with a stacked bar chart or may be an area chart or may be a simple data table. Logically we should be able to switch. Now I need to start from square a1.

[timroes]

I would close this in favor of #17076 which tracks our effort of building an (usability and feature wise) improved visual editor.