What’s in a good dashboard?
That’s a great question with a not-so-simple answer. Dashboard content is highly dependent upon the audience they are intended for. From NOC style dashboards simply designed to display whether services are up or not to complex dashboards used by developers to identify issues with the processing times of their application code – dashboards can serve a large number of purposes. I’ve even written dashboards for finance to quickly determine the impact when a system goes down – using log analysis.
Types of dashboards
As we’ve discussed, there is no limit to the types of dashboards we create as rockstar SREs. Your dashboards will be largely defined by the audience they are being created for. In discussing what should be on dashboards, take into account their technical skill set and understanding of the system, along with the depth they want to see. But in general, I think about three basic classes of dashboards.
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