[Maps] [Meta] .mvt feature completeness

[thomasneirynck]

New meta ticket to follow up on the current status of .mvt support in Maps

Status as of 7.10

For 3rd party services:

• users can manually configure an {x}/{y}{z}.pbf endpoint, similar to how they can configure a WMS or TMS image layer

For Elasticsearch backed data sources, mvt is a beta-feature:

• mvt scaling-option for ES-document layers
• super-fine "resolution" for grid-aggs and clusters

---

From a technical vantage point, it is much more advantageous for .mvt to become the default format to deliver geo-data from server (ES/Kibana-server) to client (Kibana browser-app) in a web-context, rather than raw GeoJson:

• significant reduction in data-size
• significant improvement in rendering performance and laggyness due to client-side caching

The format is particularly suited for cloud-deployments of the stack.

---

Gaps

Ideally, users would not need to know that the geo data is delivered as vector tiles.

Several functional gaps prevent the data-format to be used as the default and move the feature to GA.

These gaps also need to be closed if Elasticsearch starts to support elastic/elasticsearch#58696 .mvt. As of 7.10, the .mvt generation is done server-side by Kibana.

UX (as compared to using Json)

• [Maps] Show legend preview icon for vector tile scaling #76549, [Maps] Feature Request: have maps tile layers show loading status #76237, [Maps] Vector tile layer with only line features shows Polygon styling in Layer Style UI #92672: legend degradation. No preview / no loading-indicator. Blocked by Aggregate/query by geometry-type with geo_shape fields elasticsearch#49569 on ES-side.
• [Maps] Should allow custom min-max data ranges for ordinal styling of sizes #62867: custom size ranges are not supported. These are required for by-value styling of size with vector tiles
• [Maps] Add super fine option to heatmap layers #78311: Heatmaps do not support the super fine resolution

Performance improvements / bugs

• [Maps] Optimize tile-requests for mvt sources #70369: optimize tile-requests across layers in mb (ie. if multiple kibana layers hit the same tile-service, they should reuse the same mb-source) (~ somewhere in between bug/enhancement)
• Ability to omit features by size at query-time: blocked by Query by width/height or area of a geo-shape elasticsearch#54218 on ES-side (ie. no need to pull small features for tiles at low zoom levels). (~ somewhere in bretween bug/enhancement)
• [Maps] time-based mvt data is refreshed frequently for .mvt scaling-type #79690: refreshing time-based data is a rough. Current implementation causes FOUC, but not refreshing frequently will cause stale data to stay on screen due to client-side caching of tiles.
• support abortSignal for mvt requests to allowing canceling no longer needed requests

Polish

• [Maps] Support TileJson spec #70146: support TileJson-metadata (this would also significantly help with debugging EMS). This would also enable fit2bounds since TileJson includes the bounds of the data-layers.

Functional

• [Maps] Support term-joins for vector tile format #79866: Add support for client-side term-joins

Opportunities

• [Maps] Increase limit of features per vector tile #79718: Increase number of features to accommodate millions of documents on screen at the same time

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-gis (Team:Geo)

[thomasneirynck]

Closing. Open items from this meta-issue can be tracked individually.