The Dev console is NOT the place for debugging OpenSearch Queries!!!

Coming out of a week of deep pairing with my colleagues Daniel Wrigley and Jeff Zemerick on the upcoming Search Quality Evaluation Framework for OpenSearch, one thing that I’ve noticed after some intense swarming sessions is that we abuse the Dev Console!

We are diving into data in multiple indexes in OpenSearch and multiple steps to the data processing flow. Each step feeds into the next one, and there is a LOT of math going on in the data processing, from raw clicks to final search quality metrics, across FOUR indexes. So a small issue early on that is hard to see snowballs into a big issue by the time you reach the fourth step.

To validate the data, we tend to do a lot of “Run query in Dev Console, then eyeball the data”….

Compare that to the power of using a notebook. We can source the data in one step, and then decide various ways of understanding it, to include visualizing the data….

If you find that you are writing a query in the left panel, looking at the results in the right panel, copying something out of the results in the right panel, and feeding that into another query in the left panel then you know it’s time to break out the notebook! Use the right tool for the right job!

PS, I hate writing Jupyter notebooks, because they are hard to share with teammates and the proliferate like rabbits on the filesystem. If only we had notebook like feature built right into the OpenSearch UI so I can stay focused right there in my environment and leverage all the visualizations available to me through OpenSearch Dashboards???!!