Timelion viz documentation

[markwalkom]

We need to make sure we document this given it's now in core for 5.0 and then add it to here as one of the core visualisations.

[tbragin]

@epixa Seems like something we should tackle in 5.0, even if the docs just point back to the in-app documentation.

Also, wanted to again surface my previous comments and get your thoughts:

We don't have any docs related to Timelion at the moment. It does have a great in-product tutorial and auto-complete, but for someone who just wants to get an overview of what Timelion can do, w/o pulling up the UI, does it make sense to pull functions.md automatically into Kibana docs, as well as improve documentation around Timelion in general?

Pluggable backend support (e.g. graphite) - this is something not available in Kibana outside of Timelion. A a result, I could imagine this feature could change more rapidly than others. Do we, by chance, plan to mark this feature "experimental" to indicate this is still something that is evolving as a concept in the context of Kibana?

[epixa]

I agree all around.

I'm not sure how to automatically pull in the functions automatically, but we should at least look into it. Otherwise, at the very least we can have a description about how to use functions, some explanations for the most common ones, and then a note about seeing all possible functions in the in-app documentation.

And we should definitely mark pluggable backend support as experimental since a backwards compatibility break in any of those third party services would break associated timelion visualizations, and we have no solution for that.

[epixa]

I've created a separate ticket for marking pluggable backends as "experimental" since that should be done in the product: #8512

[epixa]

We've added some basic documentation for Timelion in time for 5.0.0, but more comprehensive docs will have to come after that.

[schersh]

Closing out this issue because it doesn't have any recent activity. If you feel additional docs are needed for Timelion, please feel free to open this issue back up.