Identify numbers in Kibana that are not displayed with full precision

[alexfrancoeur]

There is a longstanding issue opened for supporting 64bit integers in Kibana (#1274). While I understand that this is currently a known limitation with JavaScript, it would be great if we could identify or provide warning to users when viewing numbers that are displaying full precision. This will help reduce confusion around what is thought to be data corruption and miscalculations.

We would need to support throughout Kibana, including responses returned in Console (#1274 (comment))

cc: @epixa @spalger @ppf2 @jpountz

[ppf2]

We would need to support throughout Kibana, including responses returned in Console (#1274 (comment))

And also the spy/inspector thing in Kibana where it is often used to inspect the raw response coming back from ES - which is also being altered due to the precision issue.

[epixa]

Your intention is good here, but this is hardly any easier than the original issue you linked to. The moment JavaScript parses the response from the server, all of the 64 bit integers are wrangled, and we have no way of identifying whether that happened or not. This is just how JavaScript works.

In order to alter how Kibana works with 64 bit integers, we must develop and roll out a completely custom JSON parsing solution that identifies 64 bit integers in the raw serialized json string and then parses them as strings rather than integers. Then we need to update the Kibana server and UI to recognize and handle the number-represented-as-string use case universally.

Whether or not we handle these things by rendering the original integer value as a string or whether we render some sort of indication that the number has been rolled over is inconsequentially small relative to the effort I described above, so there's not really a good reason to do one over the other. I suspect we'll want/need to do a combination of both, where we render the string value where possible and the number with a warning indicator in situations where it isn't possible.

And all of this going to have a non-trivial impact on Kibana performance because JSON parsing implemented in JavaScript is a good deal slower than the native JSON parsing that is built into the language, so we'll probably want to make this opt-in or something.

I hope this clarifies that the high fruit part of this whole thing is universal regardless of how we handle the actual integers in the end user experience. I'm going to close this in favor of the original high level issue #1274

[alexfrancoeur]

++ thanks for the additional info @epixa, this helps clarify the scope and complexity of the problem. I'm fine with continuing to track in #1274