Add ability for users to set user preferences for some Advanced Options

[renzedj]

Duplicate of: #17888

Use Case

Individual users have different preferences for presentation of data and how the UI should look to meet their needs, such as light v. dark theme, date format, and timezone. This is especially true in an operations-center environment, where remote users may need to view data according to a different timezone, such as where a company's principal headquarters are located. Add ability to for individual users to override certain Advanced Options on a per-user basis.

Describe the Feature

Add ability to individual users to override certain Advanced Options on a per-user basis in Kibana. All users will have the ability to set these preferences for themselves. If not set, these preferences will default to the values set in Stack Management->Advanced Options.

A suggested (though probably incomplete) list of items includes:

• Theme: Light or Dark. Allow individual users to set the theme according to preferences. This accommodates individual preferences (impacts eyestrain), different lighting conditions in different locations (i.e., light v. dark office environments), and varying levels of visual acuity.
• Timezone: Allow users to set individual preferences for default timezone for viewing data to facilitate working across different geographical locations; should be in the same format (Joda time) as on the Advanced Options page, with the added option of Default, which reflects the timezone selected in Advanced Options.
• Date Format: Allow users to set date format according to their preferences.

[stratoula]

@legrego I think we are already working on this, right?

[legrego]

Thanks for the ping @stratoula, and thanks for raising this issue @drenze-athene --

Yes we are working on this. It's a more complex problem than you might expect, as Kibana/Elasticsearch does not have the notion of an individual user today: the same individual might have multiple credentials to authenticate to ES, so we can't rely on username/password alone to determine identity.

We've been working through the details of identity and how that will cascade from Elasticsearch to Kibana. Once the pieces to manage identity are in place, then we can tackle the problem of per-user settings and preferences. I don't have a timeline to offer you, but I can say that this one of the top priorities for the @elastic/kibana-security team.

We have a few issues open already to track per-user settings. I'll link them here to give you an idea of the types of settings we are considering for per-user customization:

• Per-user profiles, settings in Kibana #17888
• Dark Mode per User #48687
• Spaces - User specific favorite space #21640
• Dev/Personal/Sandbox Space #39235
• Different Landing page for different users #57179
• User specific default routes #19584

I updated #17888 to include your suggestions. I'm going to close this issue in favor of the existing issues above, but please feel free to continue the discussion if there is something we haven't captured that you feel is important.

[renzedj]

@legrego - Thanks for taking a look and the links to the current issues. You're correct, this is covered under the issues you linked above, as well as some use cases that I didn't consider. I especially can't believe I missed #17888 and #48687 in my search.

[legrego]

@drenze-athene there are over 5 thousand open issues in this repository, I don't at all blame you for missing these!

[krisavi]

I would add possibility to hide the timestamp field as personal preferences. There are some who prefer to see the timestamps of ingestion, but in our case since we are not parsing incoming log lines, then we will have double timestamps, one is ingestion timestamp and other one is log timestamp. I find it just quite wide area wasted on screen.