[Metrics UI] Alias "old" metrics fields to "new" metrics fields

[simianhacker]

We would like to migrate to the new ECS fields that ship with Metricbeat 7.10+. We need to look into creating aliases from the old fields to the new fields for older 7.x indices. There are some caveats with the new fields because some of the data types have changed. For example, the new network field is a delta of the bytes (or the total bytes sent between collection intervals) as opposed to counters (which are the total sum of bytes over the lifetime or the interface).

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/logs-metrics-ui (Team:logs-metrics-ui)

[kaiyan-sheng]

Thank you @simianhacker! These fields are not in ECS yet and here are the lists of fields for each infrastructure:

• Host fields
• Cloud fields
• Process fields

[jasonrhodes]

I'm not sure if I fully understand the plan here for how to best handle this. @simianhacker we should probably revisit this at some point soon and think through what makes sense. @kaiyan-sheng what's the latest status on these field sets?

[kaiyan-sheng]

Hi @jasonrhodes @simianhacker, new host metric fields just released as GA in ECS 1.10.0. These host fields are adopted by modules in Metricbeat as well.

[jasonrhodes]

@kaiyan-sheng sorry if you've been over this before but I'm trying to remember: are the old fields no longer there at all in later versions of Metricbeat modules, or do they write to both fields, or do we have aliases in place or anything like that? I'm trying to understand if the UI is going to suddenly look like it's missing data if we don't read from the right fields based on the version, which I don't think we are currently doing.

[kaiyan-sheng]

@jasonrhodes Sorry I just saw your question... We are reporting both old and new fields right now. The plan is to remove the old fields in 8.0.

[smith]

Not sure what, if anything happened here. Closing.

[jasonrhodes]

@smith I believe the current state is that the UI, at times, accounts for the existence of the old and new field names (and must deal with them differently as they are different values entirely). If Metricbeat/Agent + integrations no longer report the "old" fields, I believe a significant chunk of tech debt fork code could be removed in some places in the Metrics UI.

@neptunian could probably confirm whether this is still the case in the UI code, if we care.