Timelion App removal in 7.16

[timroes]

This issue only relates to the timelion application, not timelion visualizations on dashboards or the timelion data source in Canvas.

The timelion application was deprecated in 7.0 and since then is only available when you turn on a flag kibana.yml to still see it. We planned to remove the timelion application in 8.0 of Kibana. Instead we recommend users to use timelion visualizations and dashboards or Canvas to work with timelion. The timelion language in those is the same and is not scheduled for any removal from Kibana.

The timelion application itself is still written in AngularJS and since we plan to remove it in 8.0 we had no plans to rewrite it into React and our Elastic UI framework. Unfortunately AngularJS end of life for any security patches is before our 8.0 release is planned. We consider it a too high risk for our users leaving Timelion with an unsupported Angular version in 7.16 and remove it in 8.0.

Thus we decided to remove the timelion application already in 7.16, even though that constitutes a breaking change, that we'd have preferred doing in a major version. However we consider the safety of our users' systems and not exposing them to security vulnerabilites more important than sticking to the purity of semantic versioning.

Please also check the deprecation note in the timelion documentation and the release notes of 7.10 for more information about migrating existing timelion workpads to dashboards.

Todos

• Remove the timelion plugin (including existing deprecations in upgrade assistant)
• Make sure that the timelion workpad saved object is ignored by migration system:
  • https://github.com/elastic/kibana/blob/master/src/core/server/saved_objects/migrations/core/elastic_index.ts#L34
• Remove all left over Timelion app documentation (together with @elastic/kibana-docs)

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app (Team:KibanaApp)

[stratoula]

Additional notes here:

• We should close all the bugs that are related to the timelion-app (Be cautious! Not the ones that also apply to the timelion viz) (@timroes)
• There are some functional tests, I think that we should not remove them and we should make the necessary changes to test the old implementation of the timelion viz
• Ensure that timelion viz is not broken
• We have some deprecations on the viz_timelion codebase

  deprecations: ({ renameFromRoot }) => [
    renameFromRoot('timelion_vis.enabled', 'vis_type_timelion.enabled'),
    renameFromRoot('timelion.enabled', 'vis_type_timelion.enabled'),
    renameFromRoot('timelion.graphiteUrls', 'vis_type_timelion.graphiteUrls'),
    renameFromRoot('timelion.ui.enabled', 'vis_type_timelion.ui.enabled', { silent: true }),
  ],

If I am not mistaken the timelion.ui.enabled hides the timelion app from the menu and has nothing to do with the viz. If this is the case, this should also be removed. Does it break anything? I think is used in out functional tests server config

• Remove the advanced settings that are related to the timelion app (not if they apply to the viz)

[matschaffer]

Will this impact timelion viz present in dashboards as well? If they're planned for removal what to we have to help aid in conversion to lens panels?

[timroes]

@matschaffer This does NOT affect timelion visualizations on dashboards (or in the visualization library) or the timelion datasource in Canvas (as stated in the description above). This will only remove the application (that is also disabled by default since 7.0 unless you set some specific kibana.yml setting).

[matschaffer]

Phew! thanks 🧡