[BUG/Feedback] New discover UI in OpenSearch 2.13

[foxylion]

While some places have become somewhat nicer, we have a lot of UX issues with the new Discover UI. I hope this feedback is received well and might improve future versions of the Discover screen.

In case this matters, our OpenSearch Dashboards is configured with the theme version "Next (preview)".

Default column width

The default column with is very bad when searching through logs with data spread across columns of different length. The old UI gave each column proportionally to the content length a percentage of the available width. The new UI seems to spread the width evenly across columns.

There is a lot of unused space in the table, and important information is hidden by default.

Resizing columns

When resizing a column that does not need so much space the now "free" space on the right that is not distributed across the other columns. It is required to manually resize the other columns to now fill the free space.

Persistent column size

The above mentioned column width problems are somewhat tolerable if the column width would be persisted in the URL. But every developer in our company needs to resize the columns every time a OpenSearch link is opened. This is a lot of time wasted in comparison to the old discover UI.

Full field content

There is a small button to show the full content of a field. This looks like a nice feature but in reality it is unusable with large data like stack traces. The popup should be a lot larger to be able to see the full content.

Full document view

The full document view should spread across the whole screen, especially when field names are long the space for the field value is very limited.

Feature Request: configurable full field value display

It would be helpful to enable some thing like showing the full field value in the table for every record. (See screenshot below if you no longer remember :-)

Pagination

This might be a personal preference, but I personally dislike the pagination of the results. It does no longer allow me to search within all results by using Ctrl+F after having scrolled to the bottom.

Sticky histogram header

The sticky histogram header wastes space when scrolling through the logs. Depending on the screen size (e.g. small laptop screen) the remaining space for the logs is very small (less then 50% of the visible height).

Buggy scrolling

At least in Firefox it is sometimes impossible to scroll to the bottom of the logs with the mouse scroll wheel. The logs always jump to the top when nearing the end of the results.

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Having that said, currently I'm very happy that at least in OpenSearch 2.13 there is still a way to enable the "legacy Discover" UI. I will try out new versions of the new Discover UI, but for the moment this is not really usable for me/us (~40 developers).

[iaroslavkorablev]

I'm totally with you. We used version 2.9. We upgraded to 2.15 and encountered exactly the same difficulties. I really hope that there will be improvements.

[AMoo-Miki]

Thanks you for sharing your feedback about the Discover experience. OSD maintainers understand that the current state of Discover is causing frustration and pain for users like yourself and appreciate your interest in seeing it improved. As an open-source project, we rely heavily on the efforts of our dedicated community members to drive progress.

The bulk of OSD maintainers are focused on addressing high-priority issues that have been identified as critical for the project's stability and growth; Discover was one of these high-priority items. A few months ago, we made some usability enhancements to "Legacy Discover" and devised a plan to replace the "new" Discover with a substantially better one with respect to performance and features. Perhaps due to the limited resources, some other competing demands might have taken precedence; @ashwin-pc would be in a better position to provide a status update.

That said, we welcome and encourage contributions from the community to help accelerate the development of Discover or any other feature. If you or anyone else is interested in working on this, we would be more than happy to provide guidance and support throughout the process. Contributing code is a great way to make a meaningful impact on the project and help shape its future direction.

We truly appreciate your understanding and continued support for our open-source project. The spirit of collaboration and community-driven development is what fuels our progress, and we are grateful for every contribution and feedback.

On a side note to @iaroslavkorablev: you can get the "Legacy Discover" experience that looks and functions like 2.9, by clicking on the cog icon to the top-right of the histogram.