Investigate the use of Object Fields (JSONF)

[alvarolobato]

Investigate and potentially implement an APM Server mapping change of Custom field: Object Field -
JSONF

[roncohen]

This is the related elasticsearch issue: elastic/elasticsearch#33003

[roncohen]

This comment elastic/elasticsearch#25312 (comment) has some implication for our use case:

• Kuery bar will not be able to show type ahead for tags
• Users will be able to filter, but never aggregate using tags. E.g. you cannot do show me TOP 10 context.tags.org_uuid

[simitt]

Current use cases with dynamic user input:

• context.tags: As @roncohen pointed out, there would be some drawbacks. The most crucial one would be that it doesn't allow term aggregations.
• transaction.marks: Allows dynamic and user defined input, mostly related to numbers though, in which case JSONF would not be a good solution, as it is aiming for text support atm.
• context.custom: currently only stored, not indexed. For custom json blobs this could be a valid use case as it gives more flexibility to customers. There are ongoing discussions though to completely remove support for context.custom.

After reading up on JSONF I don't think that we have any use cases for it at the moment, so I suggest to close this issue, but keep an eye on the feature for potential future use cases.

[jalvz]

Agreed, vote for close too

[simitt]

@roncohen if there are no objections I'll close this.

[simitt]

@roncohen any feedback on this - are you good with closing?

[roncohen]

OK. Let's close it. It's too bad because this would fix the field explosions problem elegantly and @jtibshirani opened up for the possibility that it might support aggregations some time. However, since we did numbers support on tags (#1712) instead, we'll be unable to benefit from this in the future.