[Lens] Optionally show custom controls in the embedded Lens visualization

[formgeist]

Summary

Instead of asking the user to move their analysis to Lens, we want to provide easy controls for changing parameters or in this case aggregrations of the metrics displayed. These controls are custom, but instead of implementing them outside the LensEmbeddable it might make sense to be able to provide them as part of the embeddable UX.

In the above example, the user is able to change the average aggregation from average to 95p or 99p by simply clicking the button group displayed.

We can imagine lots of various use-cases for individual controls for each visualization. Perhaps there's an alternate way of implementing this as a custom component within the embeddable.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-visualizations @elastic/kibana-visualizations-external (Team:Visualizations)

[markov00]

hi @formgeist I see this as a valid request, but I'm wondering why this should be part of the embeddable.
I see a few drawback on this approach:

• if you need to a global control (to handle multiple visualization at the same time) you will probably use an external control component for that. With that in mind, what is the real benefit of putting the controls within the embeddable itself?
• The example looks fine, but there could be more advanced controls we want to add, how this will scale? I'm worried about the work that needs to be done to: avoid collisions of controls with the chart/title/other elements, the request of moving the controls on various corners of the embeddable, how to specify those configurations: now it looks just a different aggregation parameter, but in the future it could be: aggregate on a different field, show/hide an average, add a custom threshold line with some input. I feel that having this part of the embeddable just complicate the embeddable nature with a minimal benefit.
  Happy to listening others views

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-presentation (Team:Presentation)

[markov00]

We have discussed this topic internally in the visualization team. Probably a preferable approach is:

• to combine, as probably works today, an external component to a lens embeddable and let's the external component drives some parameters of the embeddable (type of query, what to show/hide etc)
• use the embeddable dashboard to connect some controls to the lens embeddable. I don't know how "lightweight" an embeddable dashboard can be, but is a great way to share and simplify the connection between the controls and the visualization

Open to suggestion from @elastic/kibana-presentation team

[ThomThomson]

@markov00, we have been considering doing a universal embeddable variables approach where authors could build and maintain variable connections between configuration / variable type controls on a dashboard and different embeddable configuration options that they would modify. You can check out the initial design discussion in this issue #134706.

If you did want to add some sort of variable configuration to individual embeddables - exposed on the panel, it would likely be best to explore the first option. This is because the Controls are currently set up as data controls, i.e. they are associated with a data view / field.

[ThomThomson]

Closing this for the time being as it looks like the discussion has stalled. In the future, the Presentation team will prioritize Embeddable Variables, which could potentially be used to drive this functionality. We can re-open this & move it to only the Visualizations team if an in-embeddable approach is deemed appropriate.