Nathan L Smith smith

Workflows, Not Tasks: Rethinking Elastic's Background Execution Architecture

2026-03-04 — Nathan Smith, Tech Lead, APM @ Elastic Observability

The Problem

Kibana Task Manager is an application-level job queue embedded in a UI server. It is simultaneously the scheduler, the claimer, and the executor — all inside a Node.js process that also serves HTTP requests. These concerns can't scale independently, and the polling-based claim model generates wasted load on Elasticsearch at scale.

Background Job Architecture for Elastic — Discussion Notes

2026-03-04 — Starting from @platformatic/job-queue, ending at first principles

1. @platformatic/job-queue — What Is It?

Matteo Collina (Node.js TSC, Fastify creator) and Platformatic shipped a new job queue library for Node.js with a clean pluggable storage interface:

Session — 2026-02-19

Summary

Audited all Elasticsearch client usage across x-pack/solutions/observability/ in Kibana. Produced a comprehensive report showing which observability apps use which ES client abstractions (direct ElasticsearchClient, custom wrappers, IScopedClusterClient) and where the key client factories/types are defined.

	---
	description: '"pro" command — open the GitHub Pull Request Overview in VS Code'
	globs:
	alwaysApply: false
	---

	## "pro" — Pull Request Overview

	When the user says "pro", open the GitHub Pull Requests extension's PR overview page (the description/overview tab) for the specified PR.

	---
	description: Code review workflow — triggered by "let's do code review", "review", or "review <number/URL>"
	globs:
	alwaysApply: false
	---

	## Code Review Process

	When the user says "let's do code review", "review", or similar:

	---
	description: Auto-sync Kibana repo with upstream and bootstrap on session start
	globs:
	alwaysApply: true
	---

	When the user starts a new session in the Kibana workspace (`/Users/smith/Code/kibana`) with a greeting or "kibana-sre" prompt:

	1. Sync with upstream: `git fetch upstream main && git merge --ff-only upstream/main`
	2. Push to origin: `git push origin main` (only if on main)

	# ~/Desktop/elastic-agent-9.0.1-darwin-aarch64/otelcol components

	buildinfo:
	command: /Users/smith/Desktop/elastic-agent-9.0.1-darwin-aarch64/elastic-agent
	description: Elastic opentelemetry-collector distribution
	version: 9.0.1
	receivers:
	- name: filebeatreceiver
	stability:
	logs: Alpha

	[
	{
	"id": "registry.android.deprecated",
	"type": "attribute_group",
	"display_name": "Deprecated Android Attributes",
	"brief": "This document defines attributes that represents an occurrence of a lifecycle transition on the Android platform.\n",
	"attributes": [
	"android.state"
	]
	},

	const fs = require("fs");
	const path = require("path");
	const yaml = require("js-yaml");

	function extractEntitiesAndRelationships(baseDir) {
	const entities = [];

	function processFile(filePath) {
	const fileContent = fs.readFileSync(filePath, "utf8");
	const data = yaml.load(fileContent);