Field statistics - sampling

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

Hi,

As I understand, in Kibana4, the field statistics are done on the n records/documents that are returned to the browser (set under Advanced settings -> sampleSize). If this is correct, then how does Kibana select n records/docs out of the total query result population? Are there any attempts made to make sure it is a truly representative sample? Random sample?

Thanks

2

I assume you're referring to top-values by field in the Discover pane? If so, those statistics are based on the 500 documents that appear in Discover. By default, for time-series data, those are the latest documents, but that also changes depending on what searches and filters you've applies in Discover.

3

Thanks for that clarification, Tanya. But sounds like the field statistics are highly misleading since they aren't a true sample of the query results.