improve the UX and discoverability of the link patterns

[yoave23]

Requirement - what kind of business use case are you trying to solve?

provide help for creating new link patterns for tags, services, and logs

Problem - what in Jaeger blocks you from solving the requirement?

Currently, there's no indication for users on how to create link patterns in the app

Proposal - what do you suggest to solve the problem or improve the existing situation?

We'd like to extend the UI in a way that will allow directing users to a reference page (either the jaeger-ui config manual or any other page that will be defined). We'd also like to be able to use the link as a javascript function invoker if we'd like to make a call to action like open a custom modal using the dynamic UI config that was recently added (https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger-ui/pull/677)

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/3125539/114016220-49197c00-9873-11eb-9bd4-78f04550d41c.mov

Any open questions to address

nope

[albertteoh]

@yoave23 how will the reference links be provided and how will users enable the info link for the service names, span tags and logs?

[yoave23]

@albertteoh the reference links will be provided via the ui-config. We'd like to achieve this by:

• adding an optional default link action (either a URL to the documentation or a js function) to the link pattern config
• generate either a link or a button in jaeger-ui to support it

[albertteoh]

Thanks @yoave23. I'd like to summarise to make sure I understand the user experience.

The motivation for this issue is to make users aware of the link pattern functionality via an "info" hint button that appears when mousing over a tag (or log, etc.) as default behaviour on every field of a span.

Clicking on this will open up the link pattern document.

Users can override this behaviour by using the existing link pattern config in jaeger-ui to link span fields to custom URL or invoke a custom javascript function.

Is that correct?

[yoave23]

Is that correct?

@albertteoh correct, couldn't describe it better myself :)

[albertteoh]

Okay, this proposal sounds fine to me.

I don't know what other folks think about having the default behaviour of span mouseovers changed to always show an "info" button, but I think improving awareness of the link pattern feature is a positive change in behaviour.

[yoave23]

@yurishkuro any thoughts?

[yurishkuro]

sounds great

[yoave23]

cool, I'm on it