Time Series Visual Builder Documentation

[simianhacker]

This PR adds the documentation for Time Series Visual Builder.

Closes #11215

[debadair]

I can make a more detailed editorial pass through this, but in general I'd like to see us move toward more user-centric documentation, where the organization is driven more by what the user is trying to accomplish.

I feel like there are two main tasks here that should be addressed separately--specifying the data you want to display, and customizing the appearance of the resulting visualizations. While people really want to be able to do the latter, the meat of this feature is the ability to combine aggs to do the former. People can pretty easily recognize a color picker and intuit how to use it. Building aggregations and specifying the data you want to display is considerably more opaque.

As far as tone & style, we lean toward directly addressing the user and sticking with the present tense. A few examples:

• "You can switch". vs "The user can switch"
• "You can define rules to customize the labels and backgrounds." vs "The labels and backgrounds can be fully customizable based on a set of rules."
• "The series label is used for visualization-specific legends and titles." vs "Each series supports a label which will be used for legends and titles depending on which visualization type is selected."

I'll try to take a stab at what I mean regarding the organization later this evening.

[debadair]

Basically, I'm thinking something along the lines of:

Building Time Series Visualizations

• Specifying the Metrics You Want to Visualize
• Charting Time Series Data
• Visualizing the Latest Value in a Series
• Embedding Time Series Data in a Markdown Block
• Customizing the Appearance of Time Series Visualizations
  • Legends and Titles
  • Axes
  • Annotations
  • Colors
  • Gauge Styles
  • Markdown Styles

The appearance customization info could also just go in the sections that focus on the different types of visualizations, but I think there are some advantages to bumping it out to the top level. For one, it highlights that you have a lot of control over what these things look like. Another is that it lets you talk about the appearance of these things at a higher level. That said, there are also arguments for splitting it up by viz type.

I was playing around with this in the attached file, but don't want to fall too far down the rabbit hole...
time-series-visual-builder-ideas.txt

[thomasneirynck]

when this is merged, we can link it to the main viz-page docs #11426

[simianhacker]

@debadair I think you're suggestions are great but it's a bigger effort then what we are looking to get in for this first release. I think we should add that to a new ticket and shoot for 5.5 for updated documentation.

[tbragin]

Let's see what we can merge in for 5.4 and file a ticket for the rest for 5.5

[thomasneirynck]

Before merging, can we add a link from the Viz-landing page, under the Time-series section? https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/docs/visualize.asciidoc

[simianhacker]

Backported to 5.4 via 7dd37e2
Backported to 5.x via 12fd67b