Add left-hand menu options

[sm-biz (Sam Miller)]

Does anyone have a quick tutorial/pointer/link on using a plugin to add additional menu options on the left-hand menu in Kibana, each with a user-definable link?

We've got dozens and dozens of dashboards in our instance, many intended for different teams, and organising them is challenging. 4 'main' dashboards were created to act as top-level navigation items, with some summary visualisations and Markdown to link to the sub-dashboards.

What I'd like to do, to make things easier for everyone, is include links to those main dashboards directly in the left-hand menu (preferably directly under the 'Dashboards' link). I already have basic plugin knowledge (we use a plugin to style Kibana) so if there was a way to inject one or more items in the navigation per-plugin, each with an arbitrary link that I would set to a given main dashboard, it would be ideal.

Running ELK 6.2

Thanks

[bhavyarm]

Hello,

I think you might have to write one as an example. I went through the known plugins list here: Known plugins | Kibana Guide [8.11] | Elastic and I don't see anything jumping out.

Currently you are definitely doing it the way a lot of our stack and users are doing it.

We've got dozens and dozens of dashboards in our instance, many intended for different teams, and organising them is challenging. 4 'main' dashboards were created to act as top-level navigation items, with some summary visualisations and Markdown to link to the sub-dashboards.

You can make the user land in dashboard as their default app using Kibana config file. But that doesn't really solve the problem?

Thanks,
Bhavya

[Larry_Gregory]

Hey @sm-biz,

We are actively working on a feature which allows you to organize your dashboards, visualizations, etc into "Spaces". It sounds like this will be a great fit for your use-case. You can track our progress (and vote!) here: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/18948

To answer your actual question about adding links to the left-hand menu, take a look at Kibana's chromeNavControlsRegistry. Here's an example of the Security Plugin registering a link: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/fe4609647dd2a7a7fedfb23d63f5886a24eacbe1/x-pack/plugins/security/public/views/nav_control/nav_control.js

[sm-biz (Sam Miller)]

Thanks guys, both very helpful

Spaces sounds like it'll be a great fit, I'll keep an eye out for it.

In the meantime, I'll use the default feature in kibana.yml to send everyone to a super-dashboard, which will then direct them to one of the 4 main dashboards, each of which then has links to specific dashboards.

I think is kind of like Spaces anyway? With the super-dashboard being the Spaces chooser screen, then the 4 main dashboards being the 'landing page' for each of the Spaces?

Cheers