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Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

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Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#11

Post by taligent »

josephruscio wrote: post #7

Dashboards provide value on multiple levels. They radiate information out into your team so everyone is working off of the same shared understanding about the state of the business. They make it easier to detect aberrations. They enable your experts to curate a set of top-level metrics on a per-service basis to look at first when fire-fighting. Every service in your architecture should have it's own dashboard. If you…

Librato is fantastic.

The only issue is the pricing can be a little unfair if you are aiming for more of a real time system since you can't define retention rate. It would be great to be able to model the same system used in Graphite i.e. real time for last 6 hours, then capture every 5 minutes for 6-24 hours and then every 10 minutes from 24 hours onwards.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#12

Post by Swizec »

tomgallard wrote: post #3

I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…

Alert emails can do a lot, but not everything.

Sometimes you need a way to look at the system and say "Hmm, everything works, but those two queues shouldn't have 20k items waiting in them ..."

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#13

Post by chime »

Dashboards are necessary but not sufficient. As your company grows, you also need to send periodic report summaries to people who can act on them. While you certainly need instant pings (emails/IMs/Tweets) in case of major issues (server down, $10k+ shipment got delayed etc.), for the most part, you need to let someone spend 15-30 mins a week to analyze the data and make rational decisions based on that. Dashboards can't help with that but creating too many dashboards will take up valuable resources that could have been used to make more effective reports.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#14

Post by taligent »

tomgallard wrote: post #3

I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…

I have to respectively disagree.

Metrics are also about the state of your business. What is your growth rate ? What is your churn ? Are people only clicking on certain features ? Where should you improve performance ? These sort of questions are essential for startups especially in the early stages where you need to be careful where to allocate precious resources.

Yes you can sort of gauge that with Google Analytics but only to a certain granularity. Graphite is incredibly flexible.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#16

Post by Kiro »

tomgallard wrote: post #3

I have to say, I'm in two minds about this. On one side- yes it's supercool to have a dashboard with maps and metrics and everything like that. And I can see it could be really useful too when something's going wrong. On the other hand, I'd be wary of building anything like this until I had a good number of customers, paying me money for a service. Is the product so complete (I would ask myself) and my users so happy…

You're too serious. My users might not care but I do.

Re: Your Startup Needs a Dashboard

#19

Post by josephruscio »

taligent wrote: post #11
josephruscio wrote: post #7

Dashboards provide value on multiple levels. They radiate information out into your team so everyone is working off of the same shared understanding about the state of the business. They make it easier to detect aberrations. They enable your experts to curate a set of top-level metrics on a per-service basis to look at first when fire-fighting. Every service in your architecture should have it's own dashboard. If you…

Librato is fantastic. The only issue is the pricing can be a little unfair if you are aiming for more of a real time system since you can't define retention rate. It would be great to be able to model the same system used in Graphite i.e. real time for last 6 hours, then capture every 5 minutes for 6-24 hours and then every 10 minutes from 24 hours onwards.

Thanks for the feedback :). We do provide a defined set of rollups today: 1m, 15m, 1h ... but in the future we intend to let users configure that themselves. If you want to shoot me an email, we can chat about the realtime scenario, I'm always interested in testing our pricing hypothesis against real-world use-cases.
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