[Timelion] Support ascending order sort on terms agg

[ycombinator]

Currently when using the split argument to the .es function in Timelion it is only possible to sort the term buckets in descending order (i.e. top N terms). For feature completeness it would be good to support sorting in ascending order (i.e. bottom N terms) as well*.

• Note that this is not recommended by Elasticsearch as it is error-prone.

[rashidkpc]

The reason this doesn't exist is that Elasticsearch has been threatening to remove sorting by ascending count for the last year or so. Though as of this morning they say that there is no plan to remove it, the issue remains open: elastic/elasticsearch#17614.

Its also worth noting that sort by ascending count isn't accurate.

[kmike82]

I understand the pitfalls of the different rankings between multiple shards for the same index. Our use case of ES/Kibanais quantitative. So, we're setting shard_size to 0 when aggregating numbers which is returning accurate results. Being able to sort by "ascending" is very useful to us with the default kibana graphs and would be great in timelion

Example: I'd like to aggregate sales performance by dollars sold per month and I'l like to see the 10 worst performers out of 1000 employees.

[kmike82]

Also note. Any index where our dataset is mostly numbers, we only have 1 shard (1 index is created per calendar date)

[stratoula]

This is possible in Lens so I am closing this as we dont plan to add more enhancements in timelion