Portal or Plugin to create new watches

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1

Hi there!

I've been wondering something about Watcher. It's nice we can make watches and all but as far as the tutorials go, you can only make them using your terminal. That isn't really user friendly because you have to remember what names you give your watches.

Isn't there some kind of plugins or something where we can view our custom watches, edit them, delete them or add new ones? When speaking of editing and adding I'd like it not to be pure code as the tutorials showcase them but simply fields you can fill. Similar to Zabbix's actions if I had to compare it to something.

2

Great question - we're definitely planning to build a UI for creating and managing watches. This is something we'll be working on in the near future.

In the mean time, you can use Kibana to list and query the current set of watches, and you can build a Kibana Dashboard to look at how your watches are executing. We have an example here: https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/watcher/current/watch-history.html#monitoring-watches

3

Great to hear it and thanks for the quick response! Do you have any indication when this update might be? I'm researching different kinds of alerting in ELK and the use of Watcher seems really preferable. Especially with a UI for creating and managing watches. If there wasn't one (or there won't be one soon enough) I might just try to build a make shift UI for personal use.

4

We're still scoping out what the first phase of the UI would look like. Can you share a bit about your use-case and needs from a UI?

5

Well I'm really in the same boat. I haven't got anything concrete jotted down but I do have a couple of things I'd like to have in a UI.

At this moment you can only add/remove/edit watchers via terminal and to do this you have to remember every single watch name and values you assigned to it. That seems like a lot of unneccessary work. Also showing the watch code in terminal makes it hard to read from time to time. For mainly these reasons I'd like to have the following things:

  • An organized view of all my watches (For example it lists all the watches with name, date of creation, active, description of function.)

  • Function to add new watches. (For example a button that opens a window where I enter my needed values)

  • Function to remove watches. (For example a button that automatically uses the curl -XDELETE. The name required could be queried on the watch you are deleting)

  • Function to edit watches (Basically a combination of the add and remove. It opens a windows like with the add function and it executes a command and grabs the name from the watch like with delete.)

  • Function to inspect a watch on history. (For example, has something happened in the past and has it alerted me or did it fail to alert me and why?)

  • When adding/editing a watch I want to be able to define a query very easily. Similar to Kibana's way actually.

On the fly these are the main functions I can think of as of now. Hopefully you can use this!

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