METRON-2205: Introducing staleDataState on Alerts UI

[tiborm]

Contributor Comments

Currently, Alerts UI sends a query request to the REST API every time the user

• add new filter
• clear filters
• change time range

This behavior keeps the list of alerts and the state of the filtering in sync: every time the filter changes the visualized data change with it.

The drawback of this behavior is it fires multiple query requests while the user tries to set up a more complex filter.

The following scenario:

1. clearing the current filter
2. changing the time range
3. adding a filter for ip_src_addr
4. adding a filter for source:type
5. pressing the query button

leads 5 queries instead of one. In the case of large data sets, this could lead to unnecessary load and UI glitches (results update the alerts table with partially filtered data).

To fix this I ceased automatic querying on time-range or filter change and introduced staled data state. This means when the user making any changes in filtering compared to the previous result UI shows the following warning:

Testing

Check out this branch and fire up the Alerts UI with the following script:
/metron-interface/metron-alerts/scripts/start-dev.sh
PR contains no backend changes so no rebuild of the full dev VM needed to test.

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[sardell]

+1. I think the behavior @tiborm implemented here is much better than sending off a request every time we add a new condition to the query, especially if those queries can be expensive to perform on the backend.

[mmiklavc]

leads 5 queries instead of one. In the case of large data sets, this could lead to unnecessary load and UI glitches (results update the alerts table with partially filtered data).

Wow. Agreed, DDOS-ing our indexing layer is very much undesirable.

+1 pending @tiborm confirms checking off the items in the checklist. Thanks for the contribution.

[tiborm]

Closing PR temporarily bc I found out this change has an unexpected impact on timer-based polling. Fix is on the way!

[tiborm]

I investigated the behavior seemed suspicious first and I think it's ok to go with it.
Short desc:
If Alerts UI in a stale data state and queries triggered by the turned-on auto polling also reflect this stale state. But, hence the warning is there I don't think is an issue.

[sardell]

@tiborm Yeah, I also think the current behavior for time-based polling as implemented in your PR is fine. User inputs a query, turns on polling, user updates input and a warning shows that their data is in a stale state. By turning off and turning back on polling (or by clicking the search icon again), the query is refreshed and the message disappears.

I'm sure we can think of better ways of handling this in the future as part of a bigger effort to refactor/rebuild the query builder, but I think this is a big improvement for now.