Add Grot Guide flows to Pathfinder

[chri2547]

@tomglenn , @moxious , @jdbaldry , @Jayclifford345 , @robbymilo

I'd like to start a new project where we take the Grot Guides listed here:

• Metrics
• Logs
• Traces and profiles
• Data sources
• Application instrumentation
• Kubernetes

Each of the Grot Guides brings the user through a series of questions, and depending on their answers, to the relevant documentation.

What if we use the plugin to:

• Ask the user what they want to do - with CTAs for each of the 6 Grot Guides
• Upon selecting a direction, the plugin will continue prompting the user with questions
• Instead of sending the user to the appropriate docs, we instantly navigate the user to the specific page in the UI where they can then pick up a learning journey to take them the rest of the way.

This project will involve

• coding work
• logic work - we need to review each of the grot guides for accuracy (they haven't been looked at in quite a while)
• identifying where in the UI we should send users
• Identifying any missing grot guides (do we need one for CP olly and DB olly?)

The Grafana Cloud trial account get started experience has gotten much better, and adding the grot guides to Pathfinder is another approach we can consider.

[moxious]

Yes let's discuss / flesh out.

Does the app need to ask the user what to do? Reason I'm posing this question is that Grot guides already do the asking. Could we perhaps frame this as basically properly exposing grot guides as a new form of documentation, such that you can follow a grot guide in product? The question tree seems already there.

Instead of sending the user to the appropriate docs, we instantly navigate the user to the specific page in the UI where they can then pick up a learning journey to take them the rest of the way

this point - what I'm imagining is that if I make a final selection it does BOTH -- if I go "all the way down the question tree" and end up where we know the right guidance for you, then at that moment your browser would navigate to the right starting point AND you'd end up with the grot-guide recommended docs auto-loaded. Does that make sense?

[chri2547]

@moxious , That's exactly it! Take what we have in the Grot guides (all of those files live here) and build out that experience in the docs plugin. Should be fairly straightforward. And then yes indeed, navigate the user to the correct area of the UI and have the docs loaded into Pathfinder. I'd love for each endpoint to be in a learning journey format.

Even though the Growth team has done quite a bit of work on streamlining the get started experience for new trial users, Katie thinks this is a great idea. And then...data!

[moxious]

Brainstorming thoughts for how we'd do this:

1. Plugin is generally looking for unstyled.html. That doesn't presently look like it exists for grot guides, because they're modal popups within pages
2. While it doesn't necessarily have to follow the unstyled convention, we do need rendered HTML for the grot guides; plugin can't steal them if they're a javascript app within a fully-rendered docs page. (Which is looks like they are)

3. This implies we'd need to work with Jack & Robby to figure out where we can yoink the unstyled HTML from which is (hopefully?) already on the website at some URL (maybe)?
4. After that, it comes to code changes inside of Pathfinder; be able to ingest & render such content, be able to handle button clicks. Getting to the docs at the bottom of a button click path seems like the last mile will be what we already have .... but with the kicker that "final step of a grot guide is always interactive, and changes app state"

@chri2547 suppose I'm in the middle of navigating down the Grot Guide decision-path. While I'm in the middle (I've made 2 decisions but not yet to the bottom) -- does the Grafana Cloud page stay the same? (I'm assuming it does, and we only change your context when we've nailed you down to one choice)

[jdbaldry]

Another idea we had is for using Grot guides in the plugin home page rather than in the sidebar.

We'd still need to consider how we want to implement that page but it wouldn't necessarily have to rely on any of the usual sidebar handling.

[Jayclifford345]

Yeah, 100% I think we can have a stuck on where to go? I want to make sure we aren't heavily cannibalising the efforts of the grafana-easy-start-app, but I think this would benefit OSS users aswell

[GrafanaWriter]

Would it be possible to add a termination point of a Grot guide so that it sends users to an interactive journey or specific page in the UI (that contains a journey, with that panel open) rather than terminating in a docs page?

Also thinking that a Grot guide may offer the user the option ("Would you like to log in so that your decision ends with the right page for set up" button (fewer words, obvs) or "Would you prefer to continue reading and be taken to the correct documentation?")

[chri2547]

Would it be possible to add a termination point of a Grot guide so that it sends users to an interactive journey or specific page in the UI (that contains a journey, with that panel open) rather than terminating in a docs page?

Yes, I have verified with @Jayclifford345 the URL snippet he needs in order to navigate the user to the exact page. And we would love to have a LJ open for them to follow. If not a LJ, then the most relevant docs page (until we have a LJ available).

[chri2547]

Also thinking that a Grot guide may offer the user the option ("Would you like to log in so that your decision ends with the right page for set up" button (fewer words, obvs) or "Would you prefer to continue reading and be taken to the correct documentation?")

Yes, some choice here would be good. They might want to go directly to the page in the UI, or see the docs, or even go to Play. We'd want to make all of these options available.

[jdbaldry]

The more I think about Grot guides as the entry point to new user decision making, the more convinced I am that this would be a really good use of the app plugin's main pages rather than as a sidebar component. I'm sure we could expose the data structure for Grot guides on the website if we wanted to use that in the app.