[Lens] Bytes formatting needs to be consistent across the Y-axis values

[cchaos]

Should the lower values of Bytes be decimals of the largest value? For example the Y axis in this:

would instead be 0.9KB, 0.5KB etc...

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We might want some granularity control over what is visible as the axis labels versus what we can see in the tooltip. Ex:

I'd like to ensure the x-axis labels are marked at the whole values, but see the decimals places in the tooltip.

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Okay, both 2 and 3 are related to the same overall issue, which is that our formatters don't have any context. It's especially noticeable because the bytes formatter scales itself between orders of magnitude, but affects dates as well. For example: #7539 #51227

I don't expect to solve these issues in this PR, as it's something the bytes formatter has across Kibana. Feel free to open an issue to discuss the problem of bytes formatting on the Y axis.

Originally posted by @wylieconlon in #56253 (comment)

[elasticmachine]

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

[elasticmachine]

Pinging @elastic/kibana-app-arch (Team:AppArch)

[wylieconlon]

This issue affects all charts in Kibana that use the bytes formatter, so I've tagged app arch on this to make sure that we are solving the right problem.

[timroes]

I am not sure if this is something that should be addressed. The purpose of the bytes field formatter is imho exactly to achieve what's described in the issue, so show values at the appropriate level, so you're getting an quicker idea on what level the bytes are without having too large numbers. If we would use the same scale for everything, we would potentially either end up with a situation where the higher levels could be 2.5GB and then you could have something like 0.00000005GB lower on the axes, or vice versa. So I don't think we should align those units across the axes.

[lukeelmers]

@timroes @wylieconlon @cchaos Can this be closed or do we still want to consider it as an enhancement?

[wylieconlon]

I would like to keep this open, since I see value in having a consistent scale for all the data in a visualization. The behavior being requested here would require a different type of formatter than what we have implemented in Field Formatters, because we need to consider the max and min values before calculating the display. In Tim's example where the domain is wide, we would have to apply rounding.

The main reason I tagged app arch is that these "domain-aware" formatters would most likely be a new type of field formatter. Bytes isn't the only example where we would want to do this, the other example is date formatting