This is a kibana plugin to create filters based on different indices. It creates a new visualization, the relational-filter, which can be included in dashboards. The visualization comes with three display options: a standard table, a drop-down menu or a multiple select.
Imagine any of the following scenarios:
- There are computer jobs that can be executed on different computer centers. Each computer center can be on a different country. You want to get all the jobs running on a particular country.
- Your company has a list of all the sales and another list with all the customers. You want to get a list of all the sales to customers that speak a particular language.
- You have list of movies and actors, and you want to get all the movies with an actor that has won an Oscar
All these scenarios are quite easy to solve with relational databases. The current approach to solve them with elasticsearch and kibana is to denormalize the data: create a single document type with the replication of all the information that might be needed. Elasticsearch does offer parent-child relation (see https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/reference/5.2/mapping-parent-field.html), with the restrictions that both document types have to be on the same index. At the time of writting this plugin, Kibana does not support it.
This plugin offers a different alternative to do all these relational queries. The approach is to keep the two types of documents separate, even on different indices, and then create a visualization that will do the select on the first type of document, and apply the filter to the second.
Coming back to the examples, this would be the approach:a
- Create a document type with the jobs, which include the name of the computer center. Create a different document type with the data centers, which includes, at least, the name of the computer center and the country. Create a relational-filter visualization on the data centers, displayin country and applying the restriction on the name of the computer center
- Create a document type with sales, which include an attribute like 'user'. Create a different document type with users, which includes, at least, 'user' and 'country'. Create a relational-filter visualization on the users, displaying the field 'country', and applying the restriction on the 'user'.
- Create a document type with the movies, which include a list user 'actor'. Create a different document type with actors, with at least a field call 'actor' and another with 'awarded_oscar'. Create a relational-filter on the actors, displaying the field 'awarded_oscar', and applying the restricion on 'user'.
And here you have a couple of screen shots of the first use cases:
This is the very first draft of the plugin. There are quite a lot of possible improvements, like:
- Add option to include the document type of the filter in the query
- Offer multiple filters on different documents