Allow unit conversion of numeric fields

[tomwhoiscontrary]

As a Kibana user, i would like to be able to apply unit conversions to fields displayed in the UI (for example, to display a field counting time in milliseconds as minutes and seconds), so that i can present events in a maximally user-friendly form.

I am using Kibana for (amongst many other things!) looking at events recording execution of some scheduled jobs. These scheduled jobs are preparing data for presentation to users. Predictably, one of the fields we send is the time taken to execute the job. There are then further numeric fields containing time values, such as the time elapsed since the previous execution, the delay between scheduled and actual execution time, etc.

We measure these times in milliseconds, because computer. The fields are just integers.

I have realised that it would be really useful to expose these events to our client managers, so they can help users determine if their data is up to date, whether there have been any irregularities, and so on. I do this via a Kibana query i prepare for them.

Client managers don't really like milliseconds. It would be far more useful for them if i could put the time fields in minutes.

[cdeszaq]

👍 I think this is a good idea to do at the Kibana / Dashboard Spec level, rather than requiring it be done at lower levels in the stack (which would, of course, be the other option). The reason I think it makes sense to do in Kibana is because Kibana is the presentation of the data, which can be less precise than the raw data.

It's a tradeoff, of course, between storing more versions of the same data or calculating it on the fly as needed, so it would be great if both were easily supported (the former already is).

[spalger]

Field formatting is certainly something we want to bring to Kibana 4. Please follow #1543 for status on this feature.