Add listing page to Discover

[cjcenizal]

Proposal

Let's add a listing page with a listing table to Discover, the same as Visualize and Dashboard.

Impetus

1. This will allow us to tag and search for saved searches using their tags (saved object tagging phase 1 #16484)
2. This will make it clearer that Discover is a creation tool as well as an exploration tool, same as Visualize and Dashboard
3. This will allow us to bring EUI into Discovery by EUIfying that table

CC @elastic/kibana-discovery @elastic/kibana-design

[epixa]

I do think the discover listing page should behave differently than visualize/dashboard, in that it should still default to nothing (its current behavior). It's tempting to lump it into the same boat as visualize/dashboard because the technology is similar, but it's not the same thing.

Whereas visualize is used first and foremost to create something persistent, discover is used first and foremost to search through your data.

The distinction here isn't whether people do use the feature to create saved objects, because we all know they do, but rather its the frequency in which they use it to load or create saved objects.

There isn't much utility to visualize except to create visualizations. It's a terrible tool for exploration, for example, which means the common use case for accessing visualize directly is to manage an object. There's no native exploration capability in the dashboard app itself - the ability to explore data within a dashboard only exists in the context of a previously built dashboard, which makes the common use case for accessing the dashboard app directly to load an existing dashboard. Discover, however, is entirely useful in its own right without any creation or loading of saved objects. For some common use cases like logging, you may use discover every day without ever having the need to save a search. This is because discover is about searching raw data, which makes it a good exploration tool for datasets with human readable data (like logs).

[trevan]

@epixa, just to add my two cents, I definitely agree that Discover's most important use case is discovery. I only save a search if I want to make it available in a Dashboard or I want to remember my complex filter.

But I do want to mention that Visualize is actually really useful for exploration, especially the table visualization and the bar/line/column/etc visualization. My workflow is almost always: go to Discover (from an alert), look at what is on that item and other items around it, switch to visualization to see a larger context of specific fields, add filters based off of the larger context, go back to Discover and do more investigation, repeat. In that entire workflow, I'll almost never save anything or use an existing saved item.

[epixa]

@trevan Thanks for weighing in. Do you pivot to visualize from the field list in discover, or do you navigate directly to visualize via the sidebar and start from the landing page?

[trevan]

@epixa, I've done both because the field list link only goes to one of the visualizations. I usually use the table visualization since I almost always want to do multiple breakdowns so I've modified the field list link to go to a table visualization instead of the bar/column/line chart. But when I want to use the bar/column/line chart, I have to go to the landing page and click create.

[epixa]

@trevan That's interesting! We should probably break that off into a separate issue or something because it seems worth digging into more. We should improve the integrations between discover and visualize to make it easier for you to move your exploration from discover directly into a context in visualize rather than having you manually navigate to the visualize app to start at least partly from scratch.

[Bargs]

It's fine if we want to improve the UI for loading a saved search, but I 100% agree with @epixa that Discover is fundamentally different from Visualize/Dashboard. Discover is not primarily a content creation tool. From a Kibana developer's perspective it may seem nicely consistent to slap a landing page on Discover so all our apps look the same. But this conflicts with the way most users actually want to use Discover.

Making Discover more like Dashboard is actually the exact opposite direction I'd like to move in. We don't serve the exploratory mode of operation well today. It's Discovery's job to focus on making ad hoc exploration and investigation easier.

[cjcenizal]

Good, healthy discussion! Closing this issue as this is not the direction we want to take Discover.

[trevan]

I was just dealing with the "load" top nav section in Discover and this issue came to mind. I'm wondering if Kibana should change the "load" click handler to take you to a Listing page?