[ObsUX] Showing asset counts in drop-downs

[roshan-elastic]

Problem

We leverage the following drop-down in the Observability UI to allow users to easily filter down the assets (hosts in this case) being returned in the current query):

Filtering Hosts by service

By default, the document count is returned. This has two limitations:

1) This is an Elastic-specific term
New users have to think about how Elastic works in order to understand this. We want to present things to users that don't require thinking about Elastic (once of our principles is 'No Elastic Knowledge Required)

2) We want to show users the count of the assets (e.g. hosts)
This will help them understand which filters have the most assets (e.g. hosts in this example) and help them decide what to filter by.

Consideration! : Simply removing the document count might not be an appropriate first step as the fact it sorts by documents helps show services with the most data (therefore likely the most hosts) is better than having an unordered list (or a list with order but users don't necessarily understand the ordering)

It could be for any asset...not just hosts : This example shows host counts but this could be equally relevant when filtering a list of lambda functions, containers, services - anything we treat as an asset in our UI

Solution Proposal

Allow specification of a formula to use for the metric used (e.g. count(host.name)) that can be used to display different counts:

The user sees counts of hosts and helpful tooltips

The user can change between different sorting methods

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/obs-ux-infra_services-team (Team:obs-ux-infra_services)

[roshan-elastic]

Hey @teresaalvarezsoler / @ThomThomson - do you know who we should speak with to have a chat about this?

[ThomThomson]

@roshan-elastic this is a neat idea and is quite possible! We don't have the capacity for a change like this at the moment, but the @elastic/kibana-presentation team is happy to offer guidance to any engineers who are working on this.

[roshan-elastic]

Thanks @ThomThomson

FYI @smith @jennypavlova @crespocarlos

We can figure out if we want to try and tackle this as part of this project, for now I've marked it as a 'could have' in the Host to GA phase 2 project

[bmorelli25]

👋 Adding a friendly reminder here that if/when this issue is picked up, please reach out to @elastic/obs-docs as documentation changes will be required (to the docs added w/ elastic/observability-docs#3480).

[botelastic]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had recent activity. It will be closed if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[roshan-elastic]

Closing - will solve for this in Inventory