What are the possibilities of a Kibana plugin?

Elastic Stack Kibana
1

Hi,

The context is Kibana 7.10.1 but I imagine the answer would be quite generic.

I have run through a lot of the plugin developer docs but I'm not seeing the kind of overview docs I'm looking for, so please bear with me if I ask a stupid question.

I understand that a new Kibana plugin will normally take the form of a new "app" on the left hand side of the gui, next to Discover, Visualize etc. I also understand that I could re-use a lot of existing components, like a search bar or similar.

However, I wonder if it's possible to modify the standard apps like Discover using a plugin.

Concretely, what I'd like to do is to make a change in the search experience, where I add a new Operator to the filter dropdown in Discover:
operators
Then I am guessing the plugin would have to generate the corresponding Query DSL to send to Elasticsearch.

Alternatively, if it's not possible to modify the existing apps, then I could make a new "app" and pull in all the relevant components from Discover and put them together into a good search experience, but that seems like a lot more work.

2

There is no filter operator registry, so there is no way for a plugin to add new filter operators. However, this will be changing in future releases: create filter operator registry

1 Like
3

Thanks for that, @Nathan_Reese! Discouraging as that is, we will be able to plan to do this in the future, then, after an upgrade to 8.10. I assume it that the filter registry will be accessible to all plugins, not only to Maps.

@Anyone, how about the other question: Can I write a plugin that modifies the layout or behavior of an existing app like Discover?

4

Instead of trying to write a new plugin to overcome Discover short comings, how about opening an issue describing your use case and Discover enhancement. That way, maybe any short comings can be addressed in Discover for all users.

5

It's not a bad suggestion, but let's assume I have a very narrow usecase that my particular analysts need, but I think very few others are interested in.

Anyway, the more important question, can a plugin modify the existing app like Discover?

6

It is not possible to write a plugin that modifies an existing app unless that app has exposed some way to to be modified like a registry.

1 Like
7

Thank you so much for your patience in answering these newbie questions!
I think I know how to proceed with this now.

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