I'm adding various drilldown actions to Splunk 7.3.0 dashboards.
I like the variety of actions that I can define. For example, I've defined some actions that affect the current dashboard by setting tokens (also set by UI controls) to filter the dashboard searches. Other actions invoke auto-defined searches (arguably, the easiest drilldowns to define). I'm considering adding other actions, such as custom searches and links to other dashboards.
However, this variety, while welcome, raises a question: How does the user know what clicking a visualization will do? The mouseover tooltip that Splunk Web displays when you hover over a data point shows the corresponding underlying data values, but offers no clue as to what clicking will do.
I'd like to offer a hint in the UI about what clicking will do.
What do other dashboard developers do about this?
Yes, as a fallback, I can write separate documentation, presented externally, that describes, "If you click on a bar in the Widgets by user chart, then [this will happen]", but that type of external documentation seems to me suboptimal, inelegant, old-fashioned.
A collapsible HTML dashboard panel containing this documentation strikes me as only slightly better.
You might respond, "Let the user explore; let them find out for themselves." I'm only partially sympathetic to that answer. While the effect of actions that jump to a new search in the default Search app cannot be missed, the effect of actions that set tokens might not be immediately obvious to some less-observant users: they might think, "What did that do? What just happened?" I'd like to avoid that situation.
