[ResponseOps] consider making some plugin config available in the UX via Advanced Settings

[pmuellr]

The alerting, actions, and task_manager plugins have a lot of configuration options:

config code from the plugins

https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/c93afa02884af7bba4da2391f7725e9d9afe5785/x-pack/plugins/alerting/server/config.ts#L12-L64 https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/c93afa02884af7bba4da2391f7725e9d9afe5785/x-pack/plugins/actions/server/config.ts#L19-L120 https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/c93afa02884af7bba4da2391f7725e9d9afe5785/x-pack/plugins/task_manager/server/config.ts#L24-L146

During a retrospective, it was noted that keeping all the meta-data around the config up-to-date is a chore. We have keys that are allowed to be used as env vars in Docker in one file, an allow-list for cloud usage in another file in another repo, and asciidoc documentation in several places, some duplicated between cloud and Kibana docs.

One thought was to try to move some of this configuration so that it could be edited "live", via Advanced Settings (AS).

pros:

• no reboot required to change a setting
• don't need to coordinate config keys across multiple repos / files

cons:

• seems like we would have to support both traditional config and AS, for a long time
• we're not sure yet which settings we would want to allow to be updated this way - is there some chance that none of our current settings would be applicable / reasonable / safe to allow as AS?

I think we'd need to do the following:

• identify what config makes sense to be available in AS; some presumably won't be (for example, preconfigured connectors)
• some new privileges required, or is there already an AS notion of "superuser" editing, for any settings that should be done only by an admin (for example, probably anything in task manager config)
• would we want per-space AS config - doesn't seem like it, but maybe something like enabledActionTypes would make sense, to prevent some connectors from being used in some spaces

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/response-ops (Team:ResponseOps)

[mikecote]

Linking with https://github.com/elastic/kibana/issues/137303.

[pmuellr]

One thing I didn't realize when originally creating this issue, is that Advanced Settings / uiSettings only supports space-specific settings. So, this became a non-starter.

Since then, support for global settings has been added; here's one of the referenced PRs around it: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/pull/147229. So, seems do-able again ...

[pmuellr]

It's been a while since we looked / thought about this one, so I'm going to set it up for triage again, especially since now it might be possible to implement (where it wasn't before, with space-specific advanced settings).