The color mapping service is used by multiple visualizations (but not Lens), so that when two visualizations are shown in a dashboard, they use the same color scheme. If there are any duplicate values in the visualizations, they get the same color. This works because there is a default Kibana palette which visualizations share today- but Lens doesn't use the default palette or the color service.

The benefit of using the color service in Lens would be that if multiple Lens visualizations are embedded in a dashboard, colors would be shared like other visualizations. However, there are some open questions about how this would work.

• Can we have a dashboard legend instead of a chart-level legend?
• Should each Lens visualization have a theme input which can be passed in from the dashboard?
• If themes are passed in from the dashboard, does it make sense to have the Lens editor support styling options at all?
• Does Lens use the right default today? I find that our default colors are too noisy for most use cases.
• We want to support color palettes in Lens as well as in Kibana as a whole. If we implement it first in Lens, will that prevent us from making a wider change in Kibana?

This issue is intended to discuss how Lens will use colors, which is related to many other issues:

• Colors on y-axis
• Color palettes in Kibana
• Color palettes in Kibana 2
• Beyond palettes