Kibana: [APM] CPU/Heap profiling

[dgieselaar]

Meta issue: https://github.com/elastic/apm/issues/121
Design issue: https://github.com/elastic/apm/issues/197

Summary

Profiles will require a specific visualization to render flame charts that are used for interactively exploring the call stacks rendered from profiles.

I would propose that we investigate what options are available for rendering the flame charts. @axw initially created a POC for the Go agent, which used an open-source flame chart library, but unsure how stable this is to embed into Kibana. Happy to create a small working group to initiate the UI implementation exploration.

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/apm-ui (Team:apm)

[formgeist]

@elastic/apm-ui @axw I updated the description with a proposal for how to initiate the implementation of a visualization in APM UI/Kibana, since we're not going to get support from the data visualization team on a flame chart in Elastic Charts anytime soon. Should we create a small working group with a selected UI dev, @axw (initially for guidance, since you did a POC already) @nehaduggal (or @graphaelli ) and myself?

[axw]

@formgeist works for me.

I would propose that we investigate what options are available for rendering the flame charts. @axw initially created a POC for the Go agent, which used an open-source flame chart library, but unsure how stable this is to embed into Kibana. Happy to create a small working group to initiate the UI implementation exploration.

@dgieselaar In case you haven't seen it, I created a more recent Kibana POC: https://github.com/elastic/kibana/compare/7.6...axw:apm-flamegraph. This uses https://github.com/spiermar/d3-flame-graph (the most widely used implementation out there AFAIK), whereas the older effort used a hacked-up version of https://github.com/bvaughn/react-flame-graph.

I also took a stab at implementing a flexbox-based version myself. It's not too hard to get the layout, but the zoom in/out transitions don't all work nicely. IIRC, transitioning from hidden to visible isn't portable. I'm not a CSS expert by any means though.

[formgeist]

I've scheduled a meeting for @axw and @dgieselaar along with me to meet next week to initiate the investigation phase of getting flame charts into Kibana to use in APM. I'll make sure to record it and post it back here for visibility.

[graphaelli]

@formgeist Did this meeting happen?

[formgeist]

@graphaelli I've postponed it until after EAH