Timelion Configurabiliy and documentation

[Ram_Varra]

I was very excited about the announcement of Timelion and introductory videos about its capability. However, I am having difficulty with being able to use it with my data. Key issues I run into:

1. I am not able to figure out how to configure Timelion panels to use a specific index-pattern or saved search. Looks like it only works with current default index pattern, unlike visualizations that allow you to select the data from any index-pattern or saved search.

2. Looks like the timestamp field is always '@timestamp'. There were some articles about how to edit timelion.json, but I can not find any clear reference documentation about this. Also, having this configured statically for entire Kibana instance in a configuration file does not sound right. I am looking for how one can select a timestamp filed as we do with index patterns or saved searches.

3. The documentation is very sparse. There are lots articles from pre-kibana (stand-alone plugin) versions to bundled into Kibana. Not very easy to figure out what is applicable to Kibana 5.3.0.

Appreciate if any one have how they are addressing these issues.

[warkolm (Mark Walkom)]

A lot of the TL help is built in/contextual, once you start typing in it'll prompt you. It's mentioned here https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/kibana/current/timelion-createviz.html

1. You can use .es(index=BLAH)
2. .es(index=BLAH,timefield=OTHERFIELD)
3. Yeah https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/8481